Iranian Media Says Iran Is Suspending Talks With US Over Ceasefire Violations

On Monday, Iranian state-aligned media said that Iran was suspending negotiations with the U.S.

Iranian officials decried the U.S.’s blockade of Iranian ports, as well as the deepening Israeli invasion of Lebanon, declaring that both are in violation of the ceasefire.

“The ceasefire between Iran and the US is unequivocally a ceasefire on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reiterated in a post on X. “Its violation on one front is a violation of the ceasefire on all fronts.”

“The US and Israel are responsible for the consequences of any violation,” he concluded.

Tasnim News Agency, a semi-official Iranian state news agency, wrote that Iranian negotiators are halting negotiations with the U.S. after Israel expanded its attacks on Lebanon, calling for a “complete withdrawal from the occupied areas in Lebanon” in order to restart negotiations.

Tasnim also said that Iran would blockade the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, at the entrance to the Red Sea, which would escalate its pressure on the global economy in an attempt to force the U.S. to reel in Israel.

Trump wrote on his Truth Social early on Monday that other politicians need to stop criticizing his negotiations and decisions regarding the Iran war, saying, “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end.”

Later on Monday, Trump said he had not heard from Iran that they were suspending negotiations, but also, that he could wait for an extended period of time before finalizing a deal, while maintaining the blockade. “I think I can wait as long as they want,” he said. “They’re losing a fortune.”

As Iranian officials voiced their complaints, Netanyahu ordered the Israeli military to attack the southern suburbs of Beirut. Families fled from the suburbs immediately after the announcement in cars carrying many of their belongings.

On Sunday, Israeli troops captured the Beaufort Castle in their deepest incursion into Lebanon since Israel’s 1982 invasion of the country. The castle is approximately 9 miles north of Lebanon’s border with Israel, significantly north of the Litani river, which marked Israel’s prior line of control. Israeli troops raised the flags of Israel and of the Golani brigade – which took part in the seizure, and has also carried out massacres in Gaza – atop the castle.

Israel used this castle, which is on a mountaintop and overlooks much of the southern region, as a base during its occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000.

For the second time, Israel issued evacuation orders for the entire south below the Zahrani river, which is about six miles north of the Litani.

Israel has killed at least 3,412 people in Lebanon since March 2, which saw the start of the latest Israeli war on Lebanon as a second front in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

“Israel’s announcement that it intends to renew its terror bombing of Beirut is not really about Hizballah or even Lebanon,” political analyst Mouin Rabban wrote on X. “Israel believes — I think correctly — that Iran will view such attacks as an unacceptable violation of the US-Iran ceasefire and respond accordingly. Israel hopes that this will in turn produce a renewal of full-scale US-Iranian hostilities and successfully derail diplomacy. “

Rima Majed, professor of sociology at the American University of Beirut, told Truthout that the escalation in Lebanon “cannot be read outside the context of Israel’s new stage of expansionism and ethnic cleansing in the past three years,” adding:

This is also linked to the broader history of Israel’s settler colonialism, but in these three years we have seen a new stage akin to the Nakba. We see this clearly in Syria, in the West Bank, in Gaza, and now in Lebanon where the occupation and expansion is of a new nature that can only be understood as annihilation and ethnic cleansing.

“If this war is possible, it is only because the US is supporting it,” she went on. “And we see how when Trump wants, he interferes to de-escalate, mainly when Israel threatens to bomb Beirut.”

“We now live in a world where ceasefire means that Israel can continue bombing, and that we can keep reaching ceasefire agreements within ceasefire agreements without all of this meaning any real protection for people,” she continued. “During the ceasefire Israel is erasing complete villages and historical sites in the south and occupying and expanding even beyond the Litani river.”