JD Vance says ‘great progress’ achieved towards final deal

Vice President JD Vance has hailed “great progress” in negotiations with Iran and says UN nuclear inspectors will return to verify Tehran’s compliance with the preliminary agreement.
Iran’s top negotiators depart Switzerland for Tehran after 18 hours of intensive talks as a team remains to continue technical negotiations on the Islamabad memorandum of understanding.
How Iran uses its unfrozen assets is going to be a sticking point in negotiations
According to the governor of the Central Bank of Iran, the issue of there being conditions on how Iran uses its frozen assets was a complicated part of the negotiations.

He said it’s going to be the decisions and guidance of the central bank how these frozen assets are going to be spent.

Starting from the initial days of negotiations, we were talking about somewhere between $6 billion and $25 billion of Iranian assets frozen in different international accounts as a result of US sanctions.

In the bigger picture, we know that between $100-120 billion of frozen assets are locked in international accounts.

That’s one of the sticking points, alongside many others such as war reparations, sanctions, and also limitations when it comes to the oil exports.
US-Iran mechanism to uphold Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire met with ‘scepticism’
Political economist Joseph Daher has expressed “scepticism” about a new US-Iran deconfliction mechanism aimed at preserving the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

“Past experiences have shown that mechanism processes have not been very successful,” Daher told Al Jazeera, noting Israeli violations continued under previous agreements.

Israel’s military still occupies more than 600 -square kilometres of south Lebanon, and has made several statements about preventing the return of tens of thousands of displaced people, he said.

According to Daher, the key issue is whether Washington will act decisively. “Will the US impose sufficient pressure on Israel to respect Lebanese sovereignty, withdraw its occupation forces from south Lebanon?”

On the relationship between Hezbollah and Iran, Daher said Tehran has “no interest in seeing a further weakening” of Hezbollah because it would expose “a weakening in socio-political influence in the region”.
Iran to continue cooperation with IAEA under established procedures
Iran will continue its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in line with existing procedures, foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told IRNA.

The interactions with the IAEA will take place in “accordance with the approvals of the Islamic Consultative Assembly and the decisions of the Supreme National Security Council”, IRNA quoted Baghaei as saying
Latest developments
Negotiators made “a lot of good progress”, and a “very good foundation” has been set for a successful final deal with Iran, US VP Vance has said.⁠
The US Treasury Department has issued ⁠a general ⁠license for Iran that authorises the production, delivery and sale of crude ⁠oil and petrochemical ⁠and petroleum products of ⁠Iranian-origin through ⁠August ⁠21.
Talks in Switzerland were “very important” to lay the foundation for future negotiations between the US and Iran, says Qatar’s PM.
Iran’s President Pezeshkian will make a one-day visit to Pakistan on Tuesday.
A ceasefire has largely held in Lebanon even as fear of renewed hostilities kept displaced people from going home.
Netanyahu says his directive to the Israeli army has not changed and troops have “no restrictions on this matter”.