Iran’s chief negotiator said Washington must accept Tehran’s 14-point peace plan or face “complete failure”, as the Revolutionary Guards staged combat drills in the capital aimed at confronting “any movement of the American-Zionist enemy.”
“There is no alternative but to accept the rights of the Iranian people as laid out in the 14-point proposal. Any other approach will be completely inconclusive; nothing but one failure after another,” Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf wrote in a post on X. “The longer they drag their feet, the more American taxpayers will pay for it.”
Iran’s foreign ministry said the proposal demands an end to the war on all fronts including Lebanon, the halting of the US naval blockade of Iranian ports, and the release of Iranian assets frozen abroad under longstanding sanctions. The plan was sent in response to a US one-page memorandum of understanding aimed at ending fighting and establishing a framework for nuclear negotiations.
US President Donald Trump dismissed Tehran’s reply as “totally unacceptable” and said the United States would enjoy “complete victory” over Iran, warning that the ceasefire was on its last legs. Ahead of his departure for China, Trump said he would have a “long talk” with President Xi Jinping about Iran but did not need Beijing’s help to end the war.
The IRGC’s Tehran exercises mark the first publicly reported capital-city combat drills since the conflict began. Defence Ministry spokesman Reza Talaei-Nik warned that if Washington “does not submit to the rightful and definitive demands of the Iranian nation in the diplomatic arena, it should expect a repeat of its defeats on the military battlefield.”
The hardening positions come as the Pentagon raised its war cost estimate to nearly $29 billion, $4 billion above the figure disclosed two weeks earlier. The conflict erupted more than two months ago with US-Israeli strikes on Iran and has continued to roil global energy markets despite the fragile truce, with Brent crude above $104 and the Strait of Hormuz largely closed.
Both sides have so far refused to make concessions while stopping short of returning to all-out war.
