Tehran says response to ceasefire proposals formulated
Amid a dual track of threats and diplomacy, United States President Donald Trump tells reporters he would take Iran’s oil and destroy bridges and power plants.
US-Israeli attacks across Iran have killed at least 34 people, including at least six children.
Iran wants to avoid returning to ‘status quo’
Alan Eyre, a former US State Department official, says both Iran and the US have put forward “maximalist positions” that are even more maximalist than the ones they held before the war began.
“There’s been no progress, partially because the distances are so far apart [and] partially because there’s an intense war going on and a lot of the people who would be devoting time to negotiations are devoting their time to avoid being killed on the Iranian side,” Eyre told Al Jazeera.
He explained that the US wants a ceasefire because Trump realises that the economic consequences of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz are “starting to multiply exponentially”.
“But that’s the main leverage that Iran has,” Eyre noted. “[The US is] bombing them and saying, ‘This will force Iran to accept a ceasefire because they’ll want it.’ Iran doesn’t want it because that’s relinquishing the leverage.
“They want to not return to the status quo because then six months or a year from now Israel and the US could ‘mow the lawn’ again. They want two things: They want some type of security structure that prevents this from happening again and they want a source of income to help rebuild what they’ve lost.”
‘They’re announcing war crimes blatantly’
Marieke De Hoon, associate professor of international criminal law at the University of Amsterdam, says that the US is announcing its own war crimes by promising “no quarter” for Iran and striking civilian infrastructure.
“If you intentionally attack civilian objectives, you cannot argue that that is lawful,” De Hoon told Al Jazeera.
“What is also important is that the rhetoric that the US is using, and also Israel, that the entire country can be taken out – ‘bombing Iran back to the stone age’ – that really implies that it is an attack on the civilian population … They’re announcing these war crimes blatantly,” she said.
“No quarter” is the refusal to spare the life of someone who has expressed their intention to surrender – something prohibited by law.
De Hoon also noted that reported attacks by Iran using cluster munitions on civilian areas would also amount to war crimes.
