The draft agreed to by Iranian and Omani negotiators awaits final approval from Iran’s supreme leader, two regional officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday
- The officials, who were briefed on the negotiations, portrayed the potential deal as a temporary solution to the U.S.-Iranian dispute over shipping through the waterway.
- They said it is tied to the agreement reached between the U.S. and Iran in June that aimed to end the fighting and reopen the strait, which ultimately collapsed.
- Potential deal will pave the way for the U.S. and Iran to resume negotiations to reach a final deal on Tehran’s nuclear program.
Draft agreements routed through Omani intermediation and parked pending the supreme leader's sign-off follow a familiar pattern in US-Iran diplomacy: technical negotiators converge on text, but the deal only exists once it survives Tehran's internal approval chain, and episodes of this kind have repeatedly stalled or been repudiated at that final step. The structure described, an interim shipping arrangement explicitly linked to a prior ceasefire framework that collapsed, is the usual sequencing in this conflict, where limited de-escalatory steps serve as confidence-building scaffolding for nuclear talks rather than as settlements in themselves. The transmission channel for crude is the Hormuz risk premium: freight rates, war-risk insurance, and the prompt Brent and WTI spreads tend to carry the tension first, and interim accords of this type have historically bled that premium out gradually rather than on the headline, since the market discounts reversibility. The distinction worth drawing is between a shipping-only truce and a nuclear track resumption; the former caps the tail risk on physical flows, the latter is what eventually moves sanctions expectations and Iranian export volumes, and only the second has lasting supply-side content. The tells from here are whether the supreme leader's office confirms, whether Washington acknowledges the same text, and whether the linked nuclear negotiating round is actually scheduled, since unsigned drafts in this channel have tended to leak precisely when one side wants to pressure the other. Treat the status as conditional until the approval itself crosses.