Qalibaf says Hormuz stays shut until Washington meets seven June conditions

Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, speaker of Iran's parliament and Tehran's chief negotiator, said on 4 October that the Strait of Hormuz will stay closed until the United States meets seven conditions set out in the June memorandum with Washington. He said the period of dragging the process out and dictating one-sided demands was over, and that the Islamic Republic's position was completely clear and firm. State agency IRNA carried the remarks. Tehran says the list has been passed to the US government through Qatar.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, speaking the same day to foreign ambassadors in Tehran, said a plan Iran has already presented could reopen the strait within seven days if the United States accepted it. He said the conditions were tied to commitments Washington would have to take on. He also said that if the United States chose a military solution again, Iran was more prepared than before and would take whatever action it judged necessary.

What the seven conditions are reported to contain

Iran has not published a single numbered annex in English. Reports of the list, carried from Iranian accounts of the Islamabad memorandum, describe five clusters that officials treat as the seven conditions: an end to the US naval blockade of Iranian ports and vessels, a lift of the ban on oil exports, release of frozen Iranian assets, removal of sanctions, and a halt to military action against Iran and against allies in the region, including Hezbollah in Lebanon. Counting those clusters as seven depends on how asset releases and sanction waivers are split. The public record does not yet include the Qatari covering note.

The strait is about 21 miles wide at its narrowest, between Iran and Oman's Musandam peninsula. The shipping lanes in each direction are only two miles wide, with a buffer between them. A large share of seaborne oil and liquefied gas from the Gulf still passes that gap in a normal year. A closure, or a claimed closure that insurers treat as real, changes freight rates and pushes some hulls around the Cape even when other ships still transit. Qalibaf's line is that normal traffic waits on the June text, not on a new bargain.

Seven days, then talks

Araghchi's seven-day roadmap is a sequence, not a concession on the list. In his telling, the United States would fulfil the preconditions, Tehran would reopen the strait after seven days, and only then would the two sides negotiate a comprehensive agreement. That order is the dispute. Washington has treated Iranian conditions as items for a negotiation. Tehran is treating them as the price of opening the lane.

The same week, President Masoud Pezeshkian accepted the resignation of oil minister Mohsen Paknejad and named National Iranian Oil Company chief Hamid Bovard as acting minister under Article 135. Paknejad had held the post since 21 August 2024, when parliament confirmed him with 222 votes. The oil portfolio now sits with the man who runs the producing company, while exports remain under a US naval blockade. Qalibaf's Hormuz statement and the ministerial change are separate acts. They land on the same problem: crude that cannot reliably leave.

Qalibaf also said the White House had to understand that the period of one-sided demands was finished. That sentence is aimed at the June memorandum, which both sides have described as interim. An interim text that one party now calls a list of preconditions is no longer a ceasefire scaffold. It is a gate. The next verifiable marker is whether Qatar confirms receipt of a seven-point list, and whether any US reply accepts the seven-day order Araghchi described. Until then the Iranian position on the record is the one Qalibaf gave on Sunday: the strait stays shut until the June conditions are met.