Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf has ruled out a new round of negotiations with the U.S. in Islamabad on Tuesday “under shadow of threats.”
He also stressed that Tehran will not sit at the “table of surrender” as a two-week ceasefire expires on Wednesday.
“By imposing a blockade and violating the ceasefire, Trump wants to turn this negotiating table into a table of surrender or justify renewed hostilities,” he wrote in a post on social platform X on Tuesday.
“We do not accept negotiations under the shadow of threats, and in the last two weeks we have been preparing to show new cards on the battlefield,” he added.
Ghalibaf led Iran’s negotiators at the first round of talks with the U.S. in Islamabad earlier this month.
His warning came after U.S. President Donald Trump stepped up threats ahead of the ceasefire’s approaching deadline and after the U.S. Navy opened fire on an Iranian cargo vessel in the Sea of Oman on Sunday.
Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs strongly condemned the attack on the ship and the taking hostage of its crew as an “illegal and barbaric act of the U.S. terrorist army.”
“The entire responsibility for the further complication of the situation in the region lies with the United States,” it said in a statement on Tuesday.
In another development, Head of the Iranian Legal Medicine Organisation Abbas Masjedi Arani announced the latest casualty figures from the Israeli–U.S. war on Iran, covering the period from 28 February to 10 April.
A total of 3,375 Iranians, including 2,875 men and 496 women, were "martyred." The highest casualties were recorded in the capital Tehran, the southern province of Hormuzgān, and the central Isfahan province, the organisation quoted him as saying.
Meanwhile, despite dim prospects for a second round of Iran–U.S. talks and an unlikely extension of the ceasefire, Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation announced the reopening of Tehran’s domestic and international airports on Monday.
In a statement on its website, the organisation also confirmed the reopening of 10 additional airports as part of a gradual resumption of the country’s commercial aviation operations.
In addition to the capital’s Mehrabad and Imam Khomeini International airports, flights have resumed at Abadan, Birjand, Gorgan, Kerman, Kermanshah, Rasht, Shiraz, Urmia, Yazd and Zahedan.
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