WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said on Friday that US warships are being reloaded with weaponry to strike Iran if talks in Pakistan fail to produce a deal, in an interview with the New York Post.
"We have a reset going. We're loading up the ships with the best ammunition, the best weapons ever made — even better than what we did previously and we blew them apart", the Post quoted Trump as saying.
"And if we don't have a deal, we will be using them and we will be using them very effectively".
In a brief and cryptic message on his Truth Social network earlier, Trump had spoken of the "WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL RESET!!!"
Vice President JD Vance headed to Islamabad on Friday to lead the US delegation in this weekend's talks with Iran, with a warning to Tehran not to "play" Washington.
Meanwhile The Strait of Hormuz remained shut on Friday and Israel traded fire with Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the United States and Iran each described as violations of their ceasefire deal on the eve of their first peace talks of the war.
The two-day-old ceasefire has halted the campaign of US and Israeli air strikes on Iran. But it has so far done nothing to end the blockade of the strait, which has caused the biggest-ever disruption to global energy supplies, or to calm a parallel war waged by Israel against Iran's Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.
Iran was doing a "very poor job" of allowing oil to go through the strait, US President Donald Trump said in a social media post overnight. "That is not the agreement we have!"
In a separate post, he said oil would start flowing again, without saying how.
Iran, for its part, described the ongoing Israeli attacks on Lebanon as a violation of the truce. Israeli forces launched the biggest attack of the war hours after the ceasefire was announced, killing more than 250 Lebanese in sudden surprise strikes on heavily populated areas.
Iran says the truce was meant to apply to Lebanon, a position initially supported by Pakistan, which mediated it. Israel and the United States say Lebanon is not covered by the US-Iranian ceasefire. But in a shift on Thursday, Israel said it would open separate talks with the Lebanese government aimed at ending the war there and disarming Hezbollah.
The rival accusations of violations appeared unlikely to derail the first planned US-Iranian peace talks, set to begin in the Pakistani capital Islamabad from Saturday.
The ceasefire has brought an expectation that Middle East oil will resume flowing and curbed benchmark oil prices based on delivery a month in the future. But the prices for present-day spot delivery have yet to fall and some refineries in Europe and Asia are paying record prices close to $150 a barrel. — Agencies
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