Tehran holds out for US reply after Trump rejects seven-day Hormuz reopening plan

Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Sunday that Tehran is still waiting for an official response from the United States to an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, hours after President Donald Trump rejected the plan publicly. The Iranian foreign ministry has not received a formal answer, according to the live updates, even as the White House has offered a blunt verdict on social media.

The sequence sets up an awkward diplomatic standoff. Washington has dismissed the package in sweeping terms, while Tehran continues to press for an official, on-the-record reply — suggesting Iran has not taken the president's social media post as a final closure of the channel itself. For a conflict in which the status of one narrow waterway has become central, the distinction between a public put-down and a private answer is not trivial.

The comments come in the latest instalment of Al Jazeera's rolling coverage of what the network describes as the US-Israel war on Iran, published on 27 September and updated by correspondents Faisal Aziz Khan and Leena Fraihat. The live blog follows weeks of escalation, stalled diplomacy and periodic flare-ups, with the Strait of Hormuz sitting at the centre of almost every question about de-escalation.

Trump's rejection came after reporting that the US president had turned down an Iranian seven-day roadmap for reopening the strait, a framework covered in a separate Al Jazeera report on the proposed ceasefire terms. In his response, the US president said Tehran was "losing so badly" and that the deal put forward was not "acceptable" — a rejection framed not as a technical disagreement but as a verdict on the balance of power.

A seven-day window is the kind of arrangement diplomats typically build as a bridge rather than a destination. Its purpose is to buy time: shipping lanes reopen, insurers and shipowners recalculate risk, freight rates settle, and negotiators use the pause to argue over a more durable settlement. Refusing to enter even a short, heavily limited window signals that Washington is not prepared to trade immediate economic relief for anything short of broader concessions.

The strait's importance is out of proportion to its size. It is the single narrow maritime passage through which the overwhelming share of the region's seaborne oil and gas exports must travel, which is why any disruption to traffic there is transmitted almost instantly to fuel prices, to import-dependent governments and to corporate balance sheets far from the Gulf.

That sensitivity explains why the Iranian offer — and the American refusal — matter well beyond the two parties in the room. Closing or restricting the passage does not require an act of war to take effect: it can follow a grounding, a collision, a mine, an insurance decision, or simply the absence of crews willing to risk the transit in the first place. Governments and markets have repeatedly discovered that shipping does not need a blockade to stop; it needs only a widely believed risk.

Among Tehran's leaders, the public mood is less patient than the foreign ministry's diplomatic language suggests. President Pezeshkian has said Iran "no longer trusts talks with Washington," according to the live coverage. That line captures a widening gap between Iran's official posture — still seeking an answer, still keeping a negotiating track open — and the deeper suspicion in Tehran about whether talks with the US produce anything enforceable.

Related Al Jazeera coverage traces how far back the current impasse runs. An explainer follows what has happened since a US-Iran memorandum of understanding on 17 June, while a separate analysis asks why US-Iran strikes resumed and what a resumption means for peace talks. Together they sketch a pattern: a tentative understanding, periods of calm, a collapse, and more attempts at a framework that both sides describe as temporary.

The information environment surrounding the conflict remains murky. Al Jazeera has separately examined an unanswered question — whether Iran has captured an unmanned US submarine — a reminder that even the basic facts of the naval contest have been contested, disputed and repeatedly re-examined as new material emerges.

The mood on the ground in Tehran is visible in more formal channels too. A photograph used in the live coverage shows pedestrians passing a billboard about the Strait of Hormuz mounted on a building in the Iranian capital on 16 September. A domestic billboard in a foreign capital about a shipping lane is a small thing, but it reflects how completely the question of the waterway has moved from diplomatic back-channel into everyday public debate.

Analysts who have watched comparable episodes tend to point out the same vulnerability in short-term arrangements: they depend on both sides continuing to want them. A seven-day plan is a stress test as much as a ceasefire, and rejecting one publicly in the first instance narrows the space for the face-saving compromises that such tests usually require.

For now, the immediate question is procedural rather than strategic. Tehran is waiting for a formal answer to a proposal it says would reopen the strait. The White House has effectively said no in public. Whether an official US response ever arrives — and on what terms — will determine whether the latest diplomatic channel collapses or survives as a thin, contested thread.

The stakes of that answer will be measured in two places at once: in negotiating rooms, where the shape of any future settlement is being argued, and in the Gulf, where every day of uncertainty around the waterway translates into risk priced into barrels of oil, insurance premiums and the import bills of countries that have little room to absorb either.