WASHINGTON, June 11 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that the Strait of Hormuz would be opened as soon as a “great settlement” of the war in Iran was signed, an event he said he expected would happen within days.
“We just made a great settlement of the war with Iran”, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
“The strait will officially open as soon as we sign, which could be soon, very soon, maybe over the weekend in Europe,” he said.
Trump said he had just talked to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and had also spoken with the leaders of Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and others. He said he would soon speak to Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan.
The deal resolved the issue of Iran pursuing the development of a nuclear weapon, he said.
“Most importantly we have a deal that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, which was the whole purpose of what we had to go through to get this. So it was a very big thing,” he said
Trump called off new strikes on Iran earlier on Thursday, saying “final points” of an initial peace deal had been approved and details of a signing ceremony would be announced shortly.
Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported that Tehran was likely to approve the agreement though it has yet to give a formal response. The cancellation of strikes came hours after the president said the U.S. military would attack Iran for a third consecutive night.
Since mid-March, Trump has repeatedly claimed that a deal with Iran to end the war is close. The two sides have traded strikes throughout the week, straining a ceasefire announced in April.
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk, Katharine Jackson;Editing by David Ljunggren)
