Trump says Iran president requests ceasfire, Tehran says 'false'
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Iran's president had asked for a ceasefire, but ruled out any truce until the vital Strait of Hormuz was reopened for crucial energy shipments.
But his assertion was flatly denied by Iran, with foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei rejecting it as "false and baseless".
Trump made the remarks ahead of a prime-time speech at 9:00 pm (0100 GMT Thursday) -- his first since US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28 ignited a regional war and sparked a global energy crisis.
Tehran has insisted there are no ongoing negotiations to end the war, and launched fresh missile attacks on Israel and US-allied Gulf nations on Wednesday, as AFP journalists reported massive explosions in the Iranian capital.
But ahead of his national address, Trump said that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian had asked for a truce.
"We will consider when Hormuz Strait is open, free, and clear. Until then, we are blasting Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!!" Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Trump's tone has see-sawed between combative and conciliatory since the war began.
Late on Tuesday, he said that the month-long conflict could be over in "two weeks, maybe three."
Pezeshkian had said Iran had the "necessary will" for a ceasefire, but only if its foes guaranteed that hostilities would not return.
Iran's Revolutionary Guards said Wednesday that the Hormuz, a narrow strait through which one-fifth of the world's oil normally passes, would remain closed to the country's "enemies".
The Guards also confirmed they hit an oil tanker in the Gulf they said belonged to Israel. A British maritime security agency said the vessel was struck off Qatar, reporting damage but no casualties.
- 'Every day we hear drones' -
An airport in central Iran was damaged in an attack on Wednesday evening, the deputy provincial governor of Isfahan province, told local news agency of Mehr.
Iranian media also said steel complexes in central and southwest Iran were damaged in separate attacks.
An AFP journalist reported huge explosions in Tehran on Wednesday afternoon and earlier strikes near the former US embassy, now a symbol of decades of US-Iranian tensions.
The Israeli military confirmed it struck Tehran, while emergency services in Israel said an Iranian missile attack wounded 14 people, including an 11-year-old girl.
Israel also said its air defences had responded to a missile fired from Yemen -- the third attack by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels since they entered the war over the weekend.
In Lebanon, seven people were killed in strikes around south Beirut, the health ministry said Wednesday, with the Israeli military saying it had struck a senior Hezbollah commander.
A Lebanese security source and a Hezbollah source both told AFP that the strike had killed Hezbollah's top commander for Iraq military affairs.
AFP correspondents at the scene saw a blackened, debris-strewn street.
"Nobody knows what's happening," resident Hassan Jalwan told AFP, adding that "displaced people have been sleeping in the open" in the area.
Israel launched broad strikes and a ground offensive against Lebanon after attacks on March 2 by the Tehran-backed militant group Hezbollah.
The Lebanese health ministry said Wednesday that Israeli attacks had killed more than 1,300, among the thousands reported killed across the region since the war began, mostly in Iran.
Iran has also carried out retaliatory attacks on nations in the Gulf it says have been launchpads for strikes.
A Bangladeshi national was killed on Wednesday by falling shrapnel from an intercepted drone in the United Arab Emirates.
Strikes in Kuwait caused a large fire in fuel tanks at its international airport, Bahrain's interior ministry said a fire broke out at a business facility, and Saudi Arabia said several drones were intercepted.
Meanwhile, a drone strike caused a massive fire at the storage facilities of an engine oil firm in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan.
"Every day, we hear the sound of drones," Waad Abdulrazaq, a 31-year-old truck driver, told AFP near Iraq's Erbil international airport.
"We hear them in the morning, and we hear them at night. We can no longer sleep or live in peace."
- Energy crisis -
Optimism sparked by Trump's comments on the timeline for the end of the war pushed oil prices down Wednesday, and stock markets rallied in Europe and Asia.
But Iran's chokehold on Hormuz, through which Gulf oil and gas exports reach global markets, has sent energy prices soaring and unleashed global economic turmoil.
Average US gasoline prices topped $4 a gallon for the first time in four years this week, while European inflation spiked and governments around the world started to unveil support measures.
"We're a small outfit," driver Nicolas Barthes told AFP at a protest against soaring fuel prices in the French city of Toulouse. "The additional diesel cost for me this month is €15,000, and we're not managing to pass all of that on."
Susannah Streeter, chief investment strategist at Wealth Club, said prices were still about 50 percent above pre-war levels, showing "scepticism still remains about Trump's claims of progress".
Trump has criticised allies for not helping in the war, and President Emmanuel Macron repeated Wednesday that France would not take part.
Britain said Wednesday that it would host a meeting of about 35 countries this week to discuss how to reopen the strait.
Washington has not said who it is speaking with in Iran, which has denied it is in talks.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Al Jazeera he still receives messages from US envoy Steve Witkoff, "directly, as before, and this does not mean that we are in negotiations".
Trump threatened earlier this week to "obliterate" Iran's oil wells, its main Kharg Island export terminal, and possibly water desalination plants if the Islamic republic didn't make a deal.
burs-np/smw
H.Beehncken--HHA
