Washington grants UNGA visas to Pezeshkian while Abbas stays barred

The State Department said on 17 September that a core Iranian delegation will be allowed into New York for United Nations General Assembly high-level week. US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of visa privacy rules, said the group includes President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Essential staff will travel with them. The war that began on 28 February, when the United States and Israel struck Iran, is in its seventh month.

The department put the decision in host-country language. "Consistent with our host country obligations, the core delegation from the Iranian regime will be able to attend UN General Assembly High Level week," a spokesman said. The same statement added two conditions. The visitors will be under travel restrictions. They will face bans on buying luxury goods and other products under existing policy. The delegation is smaller than last year's. In 2025, Iranian diplomats in New York were barred from wholesale stores such as Costco.

The contrast with the Palestinian file is sharp and recent. On 16 September the department refused visas to Mahmoud Abbas and his team for the same week. The United Nations then arranged for the Palestinian president to address the Assembly by video. Iran, a UN member state at war with the host, received the opposite answer. That split is now the political fact of the week, more than any speech text either leader has prepared.

President Donald Trump told reporters this week that Iran wants a deal and that he had heard from Tehran "directly." He said he hoped the war was near its end. Tehran has not confirmed those contacts. A day earlier a senior Iranian official said talks would not resume unless all of Iran's conditions were met. Intermittent negotiations have run in parallel with the fighting since late winter. Nothing in Thursday's visa notice says the two sides will meet in New York. Nothing rules it out either. High-level week puts both foreign ministries in the same few blocks of Manhattan under cameras.

The legal frame is older than this war. As host of UN headquarters, the United States is expected to admit official delegations to the General Assembly even when it has no diplomatic relations with the sending state, or when it is in armed conflict with that state. Administrations have used the visa as a narrowing tool rather than a total bar: smaller lists, shorter stays, a tight box around the UN campus, and shopping bans that are as much message as security. Thursday's notice follows that pattern. It does not restore an embassy. It does not lift sanctions. It does not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which remains disrupted by the wider war and has helped keep oil prices high.

The regional calendar around the visas is crowded. Houthi forces, which receive Iranian support, have pushed along Yemen's Red Sea coast and around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Saudi Arabia has asked China to lean on Tehran to restrain the group. Beijing has privately asked Iran to use its influence, three Iranian sources told Reuters, without attaching economic threats. Oman hosted US diplomats and Houthi representatives at the US embassy in Muscat over the weekend, Axios reported, with the May 2025 US-Houthi ceasefire and the strait on the table. Those tracks will sit in the same city as Pezeshkian and Araghchi next week, even if they never appear on the same schedule.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio's department is also managing a second Iran file at the UN. A UN-commissioned fact-finding mission said on Thursday it had reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes in two February strikes on a school in Minab and a sports facility in Lamerd, attacks that the mission said killed at least 178 civilians. Washington has not acknowledged those strikes. The report also found that Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity in a crackdown on protests. Both findings go to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. They will hang over any handshake photographs on First Avenue.

The practical test is small and specific. Can Pezeshkian and Araghchi reach the UN campus, speak, take bilateral meetings, and leave without the visit becoming a second front in the war or a collapse of the host-country rule? The department has already answered the first half of that question by issuing the visas. The second half depends on what either side decides to do with a week in the same city.