Trump Says an Iran Deal Signs Sunday; Tehran Says Not So Fast

President Donald Trump says the United States and Iran will sign a deal to end their war on Sunday. Iran's government says they will not.

The flat contradiction, aired within hours of itself on Saturday, captured how a breakthrough both sides keep calling close still slips on the basics: when it gets signed, who controls the Strait of Hormuz, and what a memorandum of understanding would actually commit anyone to do.

On his Truth Social account, Trump wrote that The Deal is scheduled to get signed tomorrow, and immediately after it is signed, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN TO ALL. He called the agreement A WALL TO NO NUCLEAR WEAPON!, said no money would exchange hands, and added that at the appropriate time, when all is calm, we will go in and get the Nuclear Dust, a reference to Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium. Sunday is also Trump's 80th birthday.

Hours earlier, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei had said the opposite. Speaking through the state news agency IRNA, he said a memorandum would not be signed on Sunday and that negotiators were not preparing to travel to Geneva for any ceremony. A signing, he allowed, could come in the coming days.

The gap is not only about timing. Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told Iran's Press TV on Friday that the memorandum would be a starting point for talks over the future of the country's nuclear programme, not a finished settlement. A signing would pause the fighting at once, he said, but Iran and Oman, not Washington, would keep administering the Strait of Hormuz, and sanctions relief and the unfreezing of Iranian assets would only be taken up afterward. No terms have been released, and officials on both sides said on Friday that nothing was final.

The stakes explain the brinkmanship. The Strait of Hormuz is the chokepoint for about a fifth of the world's seaborne oil and gas, and Trump has made reopening it to all shipping a headline demand; Iran has long treated its grip on the waterway as leverage it will not give up lightly. Iranian officials say deep distrust of Washington keeps slowing the path to any durable deal, and nothing in Saturday's dueling statements suggested that had eased.

This is the same standoff that, only days ago, saw the US military shoot down Iranian drones near Hormuz. The diplomacy follows two days of renewed strikes this week that strained a pause holding since April 8. The United States and Israel opened the war on Iran on February 28, during indirect talks over Tehran's nuclear programme; a separate 12-day war was fought in 2025. Trump has promised something tougher than the 2015 nuclear accord struck under Barack Obama, the deal he abandoned in 2018, while Iran maintains its programme is for civilian use only.

For now the only firm thing is the disagreement. Trump has named a day and promised the Strait will reopen the moment ink meets paper; Iran has declined to confirm either. Whether Sunday brings a signing or another delay, the president ended his post with a threat he left undefined: if the process fails, he wrote, we have the ultimate alternative, hopefully never to be used again!