US, Iran warn they are ready for war as talks in limbo
- Last updated: April 21, 2026 | 09:28
The United States and Iran both warned they were ready for war as the clock ticked down on a ceasefire on Tuesday, with uncertainty over whether talks that President Donald Trump had announced would resume in Pakistan.
The White House said Vice President JD Vance was ready to fly back to Islamabad, which was preparing for a second round of talks on ending the war that has engulfed the Middle East and shaken global markets.
However, Tehran's government declined to confirm that it would participate and accused the United States of violating the truce through its blockade of Iranian ports and seizure of a ship.
"By imposing a blockade and violating the ceasefire, Trump wants to turn this negotiating table into a surrender table or justify renewed hostilities, as he sees fit," said Iran's powerful parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who headed the delegations to talks in the Pakistani capital two weeks ago.
"We do not accept negotiations under the shadow of threats, and in the last two weeks we have been preparing to show new cards on the battlefield," he wrote on X.
Iran's Revolutionary Guards warned of targeting any vessel attempting to pass through the Strait of Hormuz without permission.
Trump has similarly accused Tehran of violating the truce by harassing vessels in the key strait, the transit passage for about a fifth of the world's oil that Iran had all but shut in retaliation for the war launched by the United States and Israel on February 28.
The channel sees around 120 daily transits in peacetime, according to Lloyd's List, a shipping industry intelligence site.
The site reported on Tuesday that more than 20 Iranian "shadow vessels" had transited past the US blockade.
Trump insisted in one of a series of posts on his Truth Social platform that the blockade was "absolutely destroying" Iran and said it will not end "until there is a 'DEAL'," in which the United States is pressing for Iranian concessions on its contested nuclear programme.
'Agreed' to attend talks
Trump told PBS News that Iran was "supposed to be there" at the talks in Pakistan.
"We agreed to be there," he said, warning that if the ceasefire expired "then lots of bombs start going off".
He separately told Bloomberg News it was "highly unlikely" he would extend the two-week truce.
Based on its start time, the truce theoretically expires overnight on Tuesday, Tehran time, although Trump said in his comments to Bloomberg the end was a day later, on Wednesday evening Washington time.
Oil prices fell on Tuesday while most stocks rose on lingering hopes for a deal to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Despite some normality returning to Tehran during the ceasefire, city residents who spoke to Paris-based AFP journalists said the situation was far from ideal.
"Let's see what happens by Tuesday," one 30-year-old doctor said on condition of anonymity.
Saghar, 39, said there was little hope for Iranians squeezed by the government and the war's impact, adding that the "economy is horrible".
New Israel-Lebanon talks
A separate ceasefire agreed between Israel and Lebanon was announced on Friday and included Hizbollah, whose rocket fire in support of Iran drew Lebanon into the war.
Israel and Lebanon, which have no diplomatic relations, will hold a second round of talks in Washington on Thursday, a State Department official told the media.
Sporadic violence continued and Israel's military warned civilians against returning to dozens of villages in southern Lebanon, claiming Hizbollah's activities were violating the truce.
The UN Security Council condemned on Monday the killing of a French peacekeeper in Lebanon, whose death Paris blamed on Hizbollah.
The Frenchman was killed and three others wounded when their unit was ambushed on Saturday as it headed to a UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) outpost cut off from the fighting between Hizbollah and Israel.
Hizbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah told themedia that his group would work to break the "Yellow Line" that Israel has established in the south, even as he said it wanted "the ceasefire to continue".
Israeli attacks on Lebanon have killed at least 2,387 people since the start of the war, a Lebanese government body said in its latest toll.
Another major issue in the US-Iran negotiations has been Tehran's stockpile of enriched uranium.
Trump, who previously said Iran had agreed to hand over the uranium, said late on Monday that doing so would be "long" and "difficult" after US strikes on Tehran's nuclear sites last year.
"Operation Midnight Hammer was a complete and total obliteration of the Nuclear Dust sites in Iran," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. "Therefore, digging it out will be a long and difficult process."
Trump uses the term "nuclear dust" to refer to Iran's stock of enriched uranium, which the United States accuses Iran of hoarding in order to make an atomic bomb.
Iran's foreign ministry said earlier that the stockpile was "not going to be transferred anywhere" and that the option was "never raised" in talks with US negotiators.
Agence France-Presse