US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, that Washington and Tehran are moving toward a settlement, hours after repeating at the UN General Assembly his threat to annihilate Iran if no deal is reached: “They want to talk to us.

They have been talking to us, even today they’ve been talking to us, and the relationship is developing. But we can’t let them — and they understand that — we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon,” he said after meeting British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, according to Reuters, in a dispatch carried by Al-Monitor. A senior Iranian official told Reuters that Tehran could reopen the Strait of Hormuz to Gulf shipping within seven days if the United States eases military pressure and lifts its blockade of Iranian ports, and that Tehran’s latest proposal was conveyed to Washington through mediators last week. “The UN General Assembly is a golden opportunity for the US to return to diplomacy,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said. Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, who headed the negotiating team in earlier talks, warned that “Trump must understand that he cannot impose his power on the Iranian people and its armed forces”. Trump also hosted the leaders of the six Arab Gulf states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) on the same day, telling the meeting there is “a lot of momentum” for a deal, according to TASS: “We’ve been mediating for a while, but I think there’s a lot of momentum for them to make a deal.” According to sources cited by Reuters, Saudi Arabia restarted operations at its East-West Pipeline and could resume exports from the Red Sea port of Yanbu within hours, at reduced volumes; the pipeline had been shut after attacks this month that Riyadh blamed on Iran-backed groups in Iraq.