IRAN TRIES TO EXERT CONTROL OVER STRAIT
After the war began four months ago, maritime traffic through the strait, which previously carried about a fifth of the global trade in oil and liquefied natural gas, came to a virtual standstill.
Iran has since sought to exert control over the strait alongside Oman, which lies across the waterway, saying it plans to charge fees to ships to use it and obstructing vessels that stray outside defined paths.
Since Thursday, the US has accused Iran of hitting at least two commercial ships with missiles or drones, and bombed Iranian military facilities in response.
Iran in turn launched missiles and drones at US military sites in Kuwait and Bahrain on Sunday, with both sides accusing each other of breaking the ceasefire.
The war pushed up global inflation and has put Trump under political pressure domestically before midterm elections in November that will determine control of the US Congress.
On Monday, the White House said Trump had authorised a temporary suspension of some duties on imports of phosphate fertiliser from Morocco, as US farmers grapple with shortages and shipments of fertiliser through the Strait of Hormuz are expected to return to pre-conflict levels only gradually.
“The meeting in Doha is going to be perhaps important, perhaps not,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’re going to find out.”
In Iran, where the theocratic leadership survived the war but faces domestic anger over a battered economy, two members of the Revolutionary Guards were killed in what the elite force described as a “terrorist” shooting in a western province.
The interim deal between the US and Iran also provides for an end to the conflict between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But Lebanon’s powerful parliament speaker Nabih Berri, an ally of Hezbollah, cast doubt on a separate, US-brokered framework deal between Lebanon and Israel to halt that war.
Analysts said the deal risks entrenching a stalemate by tying Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon to Hezbollah’s disarmament.