By Gram Slattery, Alexander Cornwell and Parisa Hafezi
WASHINGTON/TEL AVIV/ISTANBUL (Reuters) -The ceasefire brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump between Iran and Israel appeared to be holding on Wednesday a day after both countries signalled that their air war had ended, at least for now.
Each side claimed victory on Tuesday after 12 days of war, which the U.S. joined with airstrikes in support of Israel to take out Iran’s uranium-enrichment facilities.
Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, said late on Tuesday that talks between the United States and Iran were “promising” and that Washington was hopeful for a long-term peace deal.
“We are already talking to each other, not just directly but also through interlocutors,” Witkoff said in an interview on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” show. “We are hopeful that we can have a long-term peace agreement that resurrects Iran.”
Israel’s bombing campaign, launched with a surprise attack on June 13, wiped out the top echelon of Iran’s military leadership, killed its leading nuclear scientists and targeted nuclear sites and missiles. Iran responded with missiles that pierced Israel’s defences in large numbers for the first time.
Iranian authorities said 610 people were killed and nearly 5,000 injured in Iran, where the extent of the damage could not be independently confirmed because of tight restrictions on media. Twenty-eight people were killed in Israel.
The United States joined two days before the end of the war, by dropping huge bunker-busting bombs on nuclear sites, including the most sensitive buried under a mountain.
Trump said it had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme, making it impossible for Iran to make an atomic bomb, effectively sweeping the main issue of contention at talks off the table. Iran has always denied seeking nuclear weapons.
But there was uncertainty over the extent to which Iran’s nuclear programme had in fact been damaged. An initial report by the U.S. government’s Defense Intelligence Agency suggested the damage may have been less severe than Trump suggested, according to three people familiar with the matter.
One of the sources said Iran’s enriched uranium stocks had not been eliminated, and its nuclear programme may have been set back only a month or two. The White House said the intelligence assessment was “flat out wrong”.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Politico: “The bottom line is, they are much further away from a nuclear weapon today than they were before the president took this bold action.”
Iran’s parliament approved a bill on Wednesday to suspend cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, state-affiliated news outlet Nournews reported, adding that such a move would require approval of the top security body.
Cooperating with the IAEA is a requirement under the non-proliferation treaty that gives Iran access to nuclear technology as long as it refrains from pursuing a weapon.
TRUMP BASKING AT SUMMIT
Still, presiding over the war’s swift end after setting back Iran’s nuclear programme – a concern for the West for decades – provides an opportunity for Trump to bask in apparent success in front of other Western leaders at a NATO summit in The Hague.
Hours after Trump announced the ceasefire, he claimed credit for preserving it, by ordering Israel to halt further attacks with its planes already in flight. He used an obscenity on live television to say that the enemies had been fighting so long they did not know what they were doing.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the war had removed the nuclear threat against Israel and he was determined to thwart any attempt by Tehran to revive its weapons program.
“We have removed two immediate existential threats to us: the threat of nuclear annihilation and the threat of annihilation by 20,000 ballistic missiles,” he said.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said his country had successfully ended the war in what he called a “great victory”.
Pezeshkian also told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that Tehran was ready to resolve differences with the U.S., according to official news agency IRNA.
During the war, both Netanyahu and Trump publicly suggested that it could end with the toppling of Iran’s entire system of clerical rule if its leaders did not yield. Israel struck sites identified with Iranian internal repression, including Evin prison in Tehran which houses political prisoners.
But after the ceasefire, Trump said he did not want to see “regime change” in Iran, which he said would bring chaos at a time when he wanted the situation to settle down.
The war has hastened steps within Iran to choose a successor to 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, with Hassan Khomeini, a prominent reformist grandson of the father of the revolution, emerging as one of the frontrunners, according to five sources, a choice seen as conciliatory at home and abroad.
Iran’s authorities moved swiftly to demonstrate their control after a war which had revealed that Israel had deep intelligence about the location of Iran’s leaders, and apparently had agents operating across the country.
Iran executed three men on Wednesday, convicted of collaborating with Israel’s Mossad spy agency and smuggling equipment used in an assassination, the Iranian judiciary’s Mizan news agency reported.
Iran had arrested 700 people accused of ties with Israel during the 12-day conflict, the state-affiliated Nournews reported on Wednesday.
(Reporting by ReutersWriting by Peter Graff, Jonathan Allen, Stephen Coates; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)
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