Rohit Kumar
NEW DELHI, Apr 10: The United States Vice-President JD Vance on Friday left for Pakistan to take part in peace talks with Iran, expressing optimism over the negotiations while warning against any lack of sincerity from Tehran.
Addressing reporters before his departure, Mr Vance said the US was open to constructive engagements if Iran approached the negotiations in good faith. “If the Iranians are willing to negotiate in good faith, we’re certainly willing to extend the open hand. If they’re going to try to play us, then they’re going to find the negotiating team is not that receptive.”
Two days after Israel’s worst bombardment in its war with Lebanon killed more than 300 people, India said on Friday that the government was “deeply concerned” by reports of civilian casualties in Lebanon. “India has always emphasized the protection of civilians as the foremost priority. Observing international law, and respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity of states is essential,” MEA said in a statement.
A former Iranian Foreign Minister who once suggested Tehran could seek a nuclear weapon died late on Thursday after being wounded in an airstrike last week, Iranian state television reported. Kamal Kharazi had served as a Foreign Minister for Iran’s reformist President Mohammad Khatami, then as a foreign affairs advisor to the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
President Donald Trump has tasked the member of his inner circle who has seemed to be the most reluctant defender of the conflict with Iran to now find a resolution to the war that began six weeks ago and stave off the US president’s astonishing threat to wipe out its “whole civilization.”
JD Vance, who has long been skeptical of foreign military interventions and outspoken about the prospect of sending troops into open-ended conflicts, set off lead Friday to mediate talks with Iran in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.
JD Vance also said Trump “gave us some pretty clear guidelines” on how talks should go, but he didn’t elaborate.” The vice president did not take questions from reporters traveling with him. Vance’s trip comes as a tenuous, temporary ceasefire appears to be on the precipice of collapsing. The chasm between Iran’s public demands and those from the US and its partner Israel seems irreconcilable. And in the US, where Vance might ask voters in two years’ time to make him the next president, there is growing political and economic pressure to wrap it up.
JD Vance is joined by Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who took part in three rounds of indirect talks with Iranian negotiators aimed at settling US concerns about Tehran’s nuclear and ballistic weapons programs and its support for armed proxy groups in the Middle East before Trump and Israel launched the February 28 war against Iran. The White House has provided scant detail about the format of the talks – whether they will be direct or indirect – and has not provided specific expectations for the meeting.
On the eve of the talks, Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun said on Friday that 13 state security personnel were killed in an Israeli strike on a governmental building in the southern city of Nabatieh. In a statement, Mr Aoun condemned continued Israeli attacks and said targeting state institutions would not deter Lebanon from defending its sovereignty.
Iran’s Parliament speaker on Friday set a ceasefire in Lebanon and the “release of Iran’s blocked assets” as pre-conditions for the start of negotiations with the United States. “Two of the measures mutually agreed upon between the parties have yet to be implemented: a ceasefire in Lebanon and the release of Iran’s blocked assets prior to the commencement of negotiations,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf wrote in a post on “These two matters must be fulfilled before negotiations begin,” he said.
Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem on Friday called on the Lebanese government to stop giving “free concessions” to Israel, with the two governments due to begin negotiations in Washington next week. “We will not accept a return to the previous situation, and we call on officials to stop offering free concessions,” Mr Qassem said in a written message broadcast on the party’s Al-Manar TV, in which he also denounced the “bloody criminality on Wednesday,” when Israeli strikes killed more than 300 people in Lebanon.
Hezbollah also said it had targeted Israel’s Ashdod naval base with missiles. “In response to the enemy’s violation of the ceasefire and its repeated attacks on Beirut, and after the Resistance adhered to the ceasefire while the enemy did not, the fighters of the Islamic Resistance targeted… the naval base in the port of Ashdod with missiles,” the group said in a statement.
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