President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he agreed to suspend planned attacks on Iranian infrastructure for two weeks.
The move was "subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz," he wrote on Truth Social.
The announcement came less than two hours before his deadline on Iran to either make a deal that includes opening the Strait of Hormuz or else face major attacks on its civilian infrastructure.
Trump wrote that he made the decision "based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan."
"This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE!" Trump declared.
Oil prices plunged as much as 16% following the announcement, while U.S. stock futures shot up.
The 8 p.m. ET deadline â which Trump set Sunday after demanding in a belligerent social media post that Iran "Open the Fuckin' Strait" â had caused panic in the U.S. and around the world.
Trump escalated matters dramatically on Tuesday morning, writing in another Truth Social post, "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will."
Sharif earlier Tuesday afternoon had asked Trump for a two-week extension of his deadline for Iran. He also asked Iran's leadership to agree to open up the strait for two weeks "as a goodwill gesture."
"We also urge all warring parties to observe a ceasefire everywhere for two weeks to allow diplomacy to achieve conclusive termination of war, in the interest of long-term peace and stability in the region," Sharif wrote in an X post.
Both the U.S. and Iran framed the development as a win.
Trump, in his post announcing the two-week delay, claimed the U.S. had agreed to halt its planned attacks because "we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East."
"We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate," Trump wrote.
"Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated."
Iran's Mehr News Agency later Tuesday posted a statement from the secretariat of the Islamic Republic's Supreme National Security Council declaring, "the American side, despite all the apparent threats, has accepted these principles as the basis for negotiations and has surrendered to the will of the Iranian people."
"If the surrender of the enemy in the field becomes a decisive political achievement in the negotiations, we will celebrate this great historical victory together, otherwise we will fight side by side in the field until all the demands of the Iranian nation are achieved," read a translation of the statement.
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