DOHA — Qatar said on Tuesday that the United States and Iran are both reviewing mediator proposals for an interim agreement, a day after US strikes on Iran's Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz — and Qatar's foreign ministry spokesman Majed Al Ansari insisted the diplomacy is alive. “If there were no hope, there would be no negotiations,” Al Ansari said at his weekly briefing in Doha.
Source: Euronews / Al Jazeera via Daily Guardian Europe
A Qatari delegation met Iranian officials in Tehran for more than three hours on Monday before returning to Doha that same evening, Al Ansari said. Washington and Tehran were now reviewing the proposals put to them, with mediators exchanging proposals between the two sides in real time.
Qatar is working towards an interim agreement — a limited, first-step arrangement intended to build trust and allow both sides to demonstrate they will carry out their commitments, before any wider settlement is attempted. “Confidence is built through the process, not specific actions,” Al Ansari said, adding that an interim deal could be a first step towards lasting peace.
What Qatar is actually mediating
Al Jazeera's Resul Serdar Atas, reporting from Tehran, said the Qataris are mediating not a full peace deal but a framework to restart negotiations. A Qatari delegation visited Iran on Friday in response to a letter to Iran from US Vice President JD Vance, he reported, and an Iranian delegation travelled to Qatar the following day. Of Monday's brief Tehran visit, he said the reading was that the Qataris carried a message to Tehran and left immediately afterwards.
Al Ansari said freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz was “non-negotiable”, condemning threats to shipping — Doha has condemned the targeting of the Qatari tanker Al-Mayda. He warned that any escalation, whether attacks on Iranian territory or on shipping, “will have an impact on the negotiations”, and said Qatar was working closely with Pakistan — the Qatari-Pakistani mediation remains a priority — and coordinating with its Gulf neighbours to prevent further escalation. He added that Doha was judging the talks by the official responses to its proposals, rather than by public threats and statements.
Iran sets out its price: five conditions from its armed forces chief
On the same day, the chief of staff of Iran's armed forces, Major-General Ali Abdollahi, laid out five conditions he called a roadmap to lasting regional security, Iran's Tasnim news agency reported: an end to hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon and the Gaza Strip; the complete lifting of sanctions; the unfreezing of Iranian assets together with war reparations; recognition of Iran's sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, under a regional security framework for West Asia replacing the US-led one; and a guarantee against future aggression.
Source: Al Jazeera via Sangathy News
Iran's security chief Mohsen Rezaei struck a harder note on X on Tuesday, saying Washington's response to Iran's demands “was not convincing” and must fully and explicitly address what he called Iran's seven conditions — “only in this case will the Strait of Hormuz be reopened”. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, who leads Tehran's negotiating team, said Iran had delivered a firm and rational response to the American side and that “the ball is in America's court to prevent war.”
Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi, meanwhile, said on Tuesday that Iran was neither waiting for the outcome of Tuesday's US midterm elections nor shaping its policies around them — a direct answer to speculation in Washington that Tehran was simply playing for time until after the vote.
The strikes running in parallel: Qeshm Island
The diplomacy is running alongside fresh fighting. US officials said American forces carried out limited, defensive strikes on Iran's Qeshm Island on Monday after Iranian forces fired surface-to-air missiles at US assets, taking out the launcher. Iran's state agency IRNA reported explosions on Qeshm, with more blasts heard in the coastal city of Bandar Lengeh. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said on Tuesday it had downed two US MQM-170 reconnaissance drones south of Qeshm and destroyed an MQ-9 drone east of the strait — a claim reported by Iranian outlets that the United States has not confirmed.
The Qeshm strikes — the latest in a series of limited US attacks in recent weeks — were confirmed by US officials on Monday and played down by President Trump as a “minor attack”. Read the Qeshm strikes report
Trump's line: “no rush” — and Vance's optimism
President Donald Trump told Axios on Monday that “one way or the other, we will do something, but there is no rush” on deciding whether to resume wider strikes on Iran, and answered “No” when a reporter asked whether he was considering striking Iran after the midterms. On Truth Social he wrote that oil prices were “DROPPING LIKE A ROCK, down almost $10 a Barrel, A RECORD, because people feel that there will not be a War with Iran. Iran wants a settlement, as soon as possible. It could happen!” Vice President JD Vance said on Monday that he and Trump “both feel pretty good about the prospects” of a negotiated settlement, while stressing that any deal requires a firm, verifiable commitment that Iran will not rebuild its nuclear programme.
Background: a war in its ninth month, and a strait at the centre of it
The war began on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran. A ceasefire that took effect in April and was extended by a June memorandum collapsed in early July, and no ceasefire has been in force since; the US naval blockade of Iranian ports has continued. Iran's own plan, first submitted through Qatar in September, set seven steps — lifting the blockade, reopening Hormuz, a US waiver on Iranian oil sales and the cancellation of new sanctions among them — and Tehran has since said the plan could be carried out in two days instead of seven if Washington meets its demands. Oil markets have swung with every signal: Brent crude fell 7.6% to $104.77 a barrel on Monday — its largest one-day percentage drop since July — on hopes of a deal, before inching up 0.5% to $105.25 in Asian trade on Tuesday after the Qeshm strikes blunted that optimism, Reuters reported. Yaani, every $10 move in a barrel of oil is roughly ₹900 per barrel at about ₹90 to the dollar — the number that eventually reaches fuel pumps, truckers and households across Punjab and India.
Why it matters for Punjabi and Indian workers in the Gulf
Lakhs of Punjabi and Indian workers live and work across the Gulf states around the Strait of Hormuz — in Qatar itself, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain. For them this negotiation is not distant diplomacy: the strait is the waterway their region's jobs, flights home and remittances depend on, and every shipping attack or new round of strikes raises the risk around the ports, construction sites and sea routes they work beside. An interim deal that calms the strait and restores navigation would be the first concrete step back towards normal life for those workers; a collapse back into open war would do the opposite.
What happens next
Both capitals are now formally studying Qatar's proposals, and the next move is a written response — acceptance, amendments or rejection — from Washington and Tehran in the coming days. Two clocks are running against the talks: the US midterm elections being held on Tuesday, after which Trump has repeatedly been reported to be weighing wider strike options, and the military reality in the strait, where Al Ansari himself warned that one more attack on a ship or on Iranian territory could damage the negotiations. Qatar says it will not speculate on whether a deal or an escalation is more likely — only that, in its spokesman's words, if there were no glimmer of hope, there would be no negotiations.