US and Iranian leaders have traded threats as the interim deal to end the war buckled under crossfire in the Middle East as efforts continue to keep talks going.
President Donald Trump made threats on social media overnight of further missile attacks against Iran, after the funeral of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei saw open calls for the US leader’s killing.
Senior American officials demanded that Iran should make a public statement saying the Strait of Hormuz is open and ships will not be attacked.
Later, Iranian supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei vowed that Iranians would continue to avenge his father’s death.
Such revenge “is the will of our nation and must certainly be carried out”, he said in remarks carried by state television. He still has not been seen publicly since the war began on February 28 with strikes that killed his father.
Tehran has insisted that the strait remain under its control and that it be allowed to charge ships moving through it, a stance it took after the war began.
The exchange of threats followed days of US air strikes targeting Iran, sparked by Iran’s attacks on three ships in the strait, and Iranian retaliatory fire targeting Arab nations in the region.
Mr Trump has declared the ceasefire over but said the US would continue negotiations.
Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi travelled to Oman on Saturday, located on the other side of the strait, for more talks, a day after Qatari mediators met with officials in Tehran.
A thousand “missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat”, Mr Trump wrote on his website.
He said he was responding to threats “to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate” him.
Mr During Khamenei’s funeral, mourners held posters or banners calling for Mr Trump to be killed along with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr Khamenei, 86, was buried this week.
Mr Trump added that the US military would “completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran — PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!”
The US leader has repeatedly invoked the name of God in Arabic, and threatened to destroy Iran’s very civilisation. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group, has criticised Mr Trump’s “deranged mocking of Islam.”
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Iran’s foreign minister accused the US of violating the interim deal by ending waivers allowing Iran to sell crude oil on the open market in US dollars. Washington ended them in response to the attacks on ships in the strait.
“Reality check: There can only be mutual compliance,” Mr Araghchi wrote on X.
He was scheduled to meet with his counterpart in Oman. Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan told his country’s state broadcaster, TRT, that he believed “a solution can be reached” this weekend between Iran and Oman.
The US urges mariners to travel through the strait on a southern route, through Oman’s territorial waters. Iran has said the strait must be under its sole control and that vessels should begin paying fees to Tehran. The world for decades has considered it an international waterway.
About a fifth of all traded oil and natural gas passed through it before the war began. Iran’s grip on the strait during the war led to a global energy crisis, though oil prices have sharply dropped since wartime highs of 120 dollars a barrel.
Tehran’s diplomat at the United Nations said on Friday that any activity in the strait, including its opening or demining operations, “rests exclusively with Iran”.
