Washington: Vice President JD Vance will lead the US delegation for the in-person signing of the peace deal with Iran in Switzerland Friday, President Donald Trump said.
Both Trump and Vance have electronically signed the framework agreement with Iran’s lead negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, according to a senior US official quoted by The New York Times.
In a media interaction in France Monday, Trump said Vance will attend the signing ceremony.
“I may be involved, I may not,” the president said in response to a question on his presence at the signing ceremony.
The text of the Memorandum of Understanding will be released “pretty soon… sometime after Friday”, Trump said.
In media interviews here, Vance said the peace agreement was signed digitally Sunday, and its full text was likely to be made public later this week.
“We already signed the deal digitally yesterday (Sunday),” Vance said on the Good Morning America programme on ABC News.
The deal was negotiated through mediators that included Pakistan and Qatar.
Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif Monday said that his country would host the signing ceremony of the deal between the US and Iran in Switzerland June 19.
The Hormuz Strait will be fully open by Friday, and heavy tankers will get priority movement to ensure that the oil and gas supplies flow very quickly, the NYT quoted the senior US official as saying.
“Just to be clear here, it takes a little bit of time, because you know you have mines in the Straits. But you will see a significant increase in traffic in the Strait of Hormuz actually starting already, and that will ramp up slowly over time to the point where I think a week from now, two weeks from now, we probably won’t return to normal in two weeks, but we will see a significant increase in Strait traffic,” the official said.
The official made clear that the memorandum of understanding ensured the Strait of Hormuz would be “toll-free for 60 days,” with the expectation that it would become part of the “final agreement, as well”.
The Strait of Hormuz, located between Iran and Oman, is considered one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints, carrying a substantial share of global oil and liquefied natural gas exports.
