Iran's Foreign Minister Araghchi says Tehran discussed proposals with Qatari mediators to present to the US, and response is to be relayed to Tehran through Qatari mediators, adds conditions set by Supreme Leader must be met to reopen Strait of Hormuz

Episodes of this kind, where a strait closure is tied to a set of political conditions and mediated through a third party, tend to follow a familiar sequence: an initial phase of headline risk on any sign of movement, followed by a longer stretch in which the gap between stated preconditions and what the counterparty will accept does the real work. Invoking conditions set at the level of the Supreme Leader historically signals that the stated bar is not a negotiable opening position but a domestic constraint, which has in past episodes lengthened timelines and reduced the value of back-channel optimism. The structure here is indirect: mediation through Doha, proposals to be presented to Washington, a response relayed back, which is the classic pattern in US-Iran contact precisely because direct channels carry domestic political cost on both sides. The distinction worth drawing is between reopening as a goodwill gesture within a broader package and reopening as a precondition-free outcome; conditioning it on the Leader's requirements points to the former, which keeps freight, insurance, and the crude risk premium sensitive to each round of relayed messages rather than to a single yes or no. The tells are whether the Qatari channel produces a US response that engages the conditions or sidesteps them, whether other mediators or Iranian officials echo the same framing, and whether actual transit and insurance behaviour in the strait shifts ahead of any announcement.