Pezeshkian on Fox: 60% cap on Iranian uranium enrichment on the table
By offering to dilute its stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% and submit to international verification in an interview with Fox News, 24 hours after telling the UN that Iran will not bend, Pezeshkian puts the decision to end the war in Washington’s hands on the eve of the November 3, 2026 midterm elections — and puts back on the table the memorandum of June 17, 2026, that both sides had declared dead.
Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, chose the American president’s own network to make the offer the war has been pressing for since February 28, 2026. In the interview with Bret Baier on Fox News’ “Special Report”, aired on the night of Thursday, September 24, 2026, he said Tehran accepts lowering the enrichment level of the uranium it holds and submitting to outside verification. The remark came 24 hours after he took the rostrum of the 81st UN General Assembly to say his country would “never bow our head or bend at the knee”.
Asked about the uranium Iran buried under a mountain, Pezeshkian treated the concession as trivial: “We said we’re willing to dilute them. It’s not a big deal. We are willing to submit ourselves to verification,” he said, according to the transcript published by Fox News. The interviewer opened with the point that has anchored the American offensive from the start, the nuclear programme, and heard the usual denial: Iran is not seeking a bomb, invoking Khamenei’s fatwa — issued in the mid-1990s and made public in 2003 — that declares the weapon illicit; the leader who signed it was assassinated in the first hour of the war, on 02/28, and the ban’s standing without him is already disputed among the clergy.
What the offer includes and what it leaves out
The legal basis Pezeshkian invoked to support the offer is the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and recorded the proposal: “Within the framework of international law and on the basis of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, we will comply with everything the norms require of us.” What that formula hides is what the same report recalls: the NPT grants Iran the right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy, enrichment included, under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, and sets no numerical ceiling at all — neither the 3.67% of reactor fuel nor the 60% Tehran once produced.
Diluting the stockpile that already exists and stopping the production of a new stockpile are different operations, and Pezeshkian offered the first. The second, which would require dismantling centrifuges and accepting an enrichment cap, did not appear in the interview.
The verification nobody can perform today
The offer to accept inspection arrives at the moment inspection is suspended. On September 9, 2026, the IAEA Board of Governors referred Iran to the UN Security Council for non-compliance with its safeguards obligations — the first time in 20 years, according to National Public Radio (NPR). The agency reports that the country restricts inspectors’ access and that it cannot verify stockpiles of uranium enriched to a level close to weapons grade. Whoever cannot measure the stockpile cannot confirm the dilution either, and the return of the inspectors enters the talks as an asset Tehran has yet to hand over.
The memorandum both sides declared dead
The agreement Pezeshkian says he signed with Trump exists, and it was signed on June 17, 2026, mediated by Pakistan — a 14-point text with a 60-day deadline for a final deal. The memorandum’s nuclear paragraph already anticipated what he offered on American television: the parties agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material through a mechanism whose “minimum methodology” would be downblending on site under IAEA supervision, and left the discussion of enrichment to the final deal, as the published text shows. The document also provided for the end of the naval blockade within 30 days, free passage through the strait at no charge for 60 days and a reconstruction plan of at least US$300 billion.
The memorandum did not last a month. Ten days after the signing, the two sides were trading strikes again over who authorised shipping routes in Hormuz; on July 7, 2026, Trump declared the agreement “over”, and Iranian officials responded by suspending their own obligations. The 60-day deadline expired on August 17, 2026, without a final deal. Pressed on Fox about the collapse, Pezeshkian turned the question around: “Why is it that within two weeks after the signing of an agreement, they chose to blow it up?”
The nuclear paragraph was the least contested passage in the June memorandum. What brought the agreement down was the fight over who commands the Strait of Hormuz.
The pressure switches sides
That same Thursday, negotiators from both countries were discussing in New York a phased path out of the war, with the reopening of Hormuz on one side and the end of the economic blockade on the other, plus access to frozen assets, according to Reuters. A White House official said Trump remains open to talking but that the United States does not need to negotiate because it is in a strong position; the White House and the State Department did not respond to the agency’s requests for comment. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi put forward a seven-day proposal to reopen the strait, and Tehran is signalling it would prefer a deal before the midterm elections, according to Bloomberg. The market reacted to both signals: Brent fell towards US$106 a barrel on news that the two sides were talking again, after rising more than 7% in two days.
Trump told the UN he could “annihilate” the country if there is no deal and, at the same time, that he believes an understanding will come after the election; Pezeshkian answered that, for Tehran, before or after the vote makes no difference. The gap between the two lines sketches the deadlock that has held since Trump’s speech at the UN on September 22, 2026: the offer to dilute uranium was made on American television, with both sides negotiating in New York and the price of fuel on the campaign’s ledger, and the decision stayed with Washington. Accepting before the vote means displaying a nuclear concession in the middle of an election; refusing means owning a war that has now run nearly seven months.
The interview was not only about uranium. Pezeshkian denied knowing about the satellite imagery the interviewer tied to the attack on an American base in Jordan — “I’m specifically unaware of these purported images” — and denied that Tehran had closed Hormuz: “We have not closed the Strait of Hormuz. It was open without any legal justification or framework. They attacked us.” Both answers belong to the same movement as the offer: taking authorship of the escalation away from Tehran before asking Washington to choose to end it.
Who signs for the offer
Pezeshkian is the civilian face of a system in which military power does not pass through the cabinet. The press aligned with the Revolutionary Guard has treated the negotiation as a mistake: after the UN speech, the newspaper Kayhan wrote that the president had turned New York into a court against Washington and Tel Aviv, Javan put “we will not surrender” on its front page and a Tasnim article called Araghchi’s contacts with the American envoys a great gift to Trump, according to Iran International, an Iranian outlet in exile. Mojtaba Khamenei succeeded the father assassinated on February 28, 2026 and still does not appear in public, and the country’s power centres have migrated to the security institutions.
On Thursday night, what Washington had on the table was the offer of a president who commands neither the armed forces nor the Revolutionary Guard, made on the American president’s network and addressed to the American public. The episode leaves open questions. Who, in Tehran, signs that offer: the president who stated it, the Revolutionary Guard, or Mojtaba Khamenei, the supreme leader who took over in March 2026? And if Trump accepts, how can a state incapable of honouring agreements be trusted?