Iran will halt its own attacks as long as the United States maintains its latest pause on air strikes, a senior Iranian official told Reuters on Sunday, after President Donald Trump abruptly called off his two-week-old bombing campaign.
After 13 nights of intensifying US air strikes on Iran, the Pentagon abruptly suspended the campaign late on Friday, with no US attacks reported on either Saturday or Sunday.
Iran, which had been following each night of US attacks with its own strikes on neighbouring countries that host US bases, has also so far held fire for two days.
The US ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, told Fox News on Sunday that Trump had decided to pause US attacks to allow more time for diplomacy.
“He’s giving talks some space, he’s giving it a little bit of room,” Waltz said, without providing further details.
The senior Iranian source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters: “Iran’s position remains ‘attack for attack’: if the attacks stop, Iran will also halt its operations. That message has already been conveyed to the United States.”
The source added: “However, Iran is prepared to mount a broad response should the US launch another attack.”
Asked about the pause, a senior official in Trump’s administration said on Saturday that the president “has always been clear that his preference is diplomacy, but he has shown Iran what will happen if they fail to come to the table in a serious way.”
The senior Iranian source said Tehran did not hold much hope that Trump’s decision to pause strikes represented a major shift in the US negotiating position.
“There is more scepticism than optimism about the halt in attacks. The prevailing view is that the pause is tactical rather than genuine. Iran has accumulated enough bitter experience with what it sees as US deception,” the source said.
