Negotiations in Islamabad between Iran and the United States this past weekend ran for 21 hours from Saturday into Sunday and failed to produce a deal. When Vice President JD Vance emerged from the talks, he said that the U.S. had presented Iran with its “final and best offer,” framing the impasse around nuclear specifically—a framing Iran rejected. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who helped lead the Iranian delegation, said Iran and the U.S. were “inches away” from an “Islamabad MoU” following “intensive talks at highest level in 47 years,” but the talks fell through because of U.S. “maximalism, shifting goalposts and blockade.”
Meanwhile, as Israel continued to bombard Lebanon on Tuesday and Hezbollah conducted retaliatory attacks, Israeli and Lebanese government officials met in Washington, DC, for their highest-level direct talks in decades. In the run-up to the meeting, Lebanon’s presidency said the talks would focus on announcing a ceasefire and setting a start date for bilateral talks. However, Israel has said it would not discuss a ceasefire during the talks and instead would focus on disarming Hezbollah and establishing peaceful relations between Israel and Lebanon. Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem in a televised address Monday rejected the planned meeting, calling the talks “futile” and urging the Lebanese government to take “a historic and heroic stance” by refusing to attend.
Drop Site’s Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous discuss the latest with Palestinian American journalist Rami Khouri , a distinguished public policy fellow at the American University of Beirut and nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington, DC.
Jeremy and Sharif also discuss the case of American born Kuwaiti journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, who was arrested six weeks ago in Kuwait where he remains in detention and faces prosecution in a special tribunal over social media posts related to the Iran war.
