CAIRO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said his Omani counterpart presented elements of a U.S. proposal for a nuclear deal between Tehran and Washington during a short visit to Tehran on Saturday.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said later on Saturday that U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff “has sent a detailed and acceptable proposal to the Iranian regime, and it’s in their best interest to accept it.”
Araqchi said in a post on X that Iran “will respond to the U.S. proposal in line with the principles, national interests and rights of people of Iran”.
His statement came ahead of an anticipated sixth round of talks between Washington and Tehran to resolve a decades-long dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme. The date and venue of the talks have not been announced yet.
“President Trump has made it clear that Iran can never obtain a nuclear bomb,'” Leavitt said in a statement, confirming that the U.S proposal had been communicated to Iran. She declined to provide further details.
Trump said on Friday that an Iran deal was possible in the “not-too-distant future.”
Earlier in the week, Trump told reporters he had recently warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to take actions that could disrupt nuclear talks with Iran. Those comments appeared to signal U.S. concern that Israel might strike Iran’s nuclear facilities while U.S. diplomatic efforts were under way.
Trump himself has repeatedly threatened to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities if diplomacy fails to achieve a deal.
One of the main sticking points in the talks between U.S. and Iranian officials has been U.S. insistence that Iran give up its nuclear enrichment facilities, a demand Iran rejects.
Trump, who has restored a “maximum pressure” campaign on Tehran since February, ditched a 2015 nuclear pact between Iran and six world powers in 2018 during his first term and reimposed crippling sanctions on Iran.
In the intervening years, Tehran has steadily overstepped the 2015 agreement’s limits on its nuclear programme, designed to make it harder to develop an atomic bomb. Tehran denies it is seeking a nuclear weapon.
(Reporting by Menna Alaa El-Din, Muhammed Al Gebaly and Matt Spetalnick;Editing by Frances Kerry and Chizu Nomiyama )
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