Donald Trump’s ceasefire plan came together in a frenetic flurry of telephone diplomacy on Monday night, with the US president pressuring Israel to accept a truce while Qatar urged Tehran to sign up.
Shortly after Iran’s attack on Al Udeid, a US military base in Qatar, on Monday, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed a deal in principle, said one person familiar with the matter.
According to a diplomat also briefed on the talks, Trump told the Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani that he had convinced Israel to agree to a ceasefire and asked Doha to persuade the Iranian leadership to accept the truce.
The first person confirmed that Qatar then spoke to Iran about the truce, which came together in the space of about two hours.
No details of the deal have yet been made public. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump had been quick to signal that he would not retaliate for Iran’s attack on the US’s biggest military base in the Middle East, which caused no casualties after air defences in Qatar successfully intercepted the barrage.
The Iranian barrage was in response to Trump’s decision to deploy stealth war planes to attack Iran’s main nuclear sites with huge bunker-busting bombs over the weekend.
Thanking Iran “for giving us early notice”, the US president described Tehran’s response to Washington’s bombing of its nuclear sites as “very weak”, and said he hoped “they’ve got it all out of their ‘system’”.
He then orchestrated the diplomatic push to end the 12-day conflict, triggered by Israel’s large-scale aerial assault on Iran.
Despite being the target of Iran’s response to the US strikes, Qatar was a natural choice as an interlocutor. The small Gulf state is one of the few nations that has historically had good ties with both Tehran and Washington and has a long record of working as a mediator on the US’s behalf — from Afghanistan to Venezuela.
After the first call between Trump and Sheikh Tamim, US vice-president JD Vance and Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani co-ordinated on the details and liaised with the Israelis and Iranians respectively, the diplomat said.
“Following discussions with the Qatari prime minister, the Iranians agreed,” the regional diplomat said. “Despite having been attacked just hours earlier, the Qataris set aside their grievances and prioritised regional security to get the deal done.”
By early evening in Washington on Monday, Trump announced the sudden breakthrough, declaring the ceasefire and congratulating “both Countries, Israel and Iran, on having the Stamina, Courage, and Intelligence to end what should be called, ‘THE 12 DAY WAR’”.
Early on Tuesday, he thanked Qatar’s emir “for all that he has done in seeking peace for the region”.
But the fragile deal was immediately tested. An Iranian strike on a residential building in southern Israel killed at least four people around 6am, an hour before the ceasefire was to come into effect. Israeli authorities said two more missiles were fired at northern Israel at around 10.30am.
Israel, which had carried out an intense bombardment of Tehran through the night, said it responded by destroying a radar installation near the Iranian capital.
Netanyahu’s office said he refrained from a more robust response after speaking to Trump, who accused both sides of violating the truce and said he was “not happy with Israel”.
Both sides predictably claimed the upper hand. Netanyahu’s office said the objectives of Israel’s operation had been achieved, while Iran claimed the truce had “imposed” the ceasefire on its enemy and boasted about its retaliation against the US.
Indirect contact between the US and Iran had continued even during the conflict. Qatar and Oman carried messages between Tehran and Washington, and Iran signalled it would agree to an end to the war.
But despite the damage inflicted by Israel, and the risk of American strikes, Iran’s leadership insisted it would only agree to a ceasefire if Israel stopped firing and that it would not capitulate under Israeli and US pressure.
Israeli officials had also been looking for a way to wrap up the fighting since the US carried out its bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the dead of night on Sunday, according to people familiar with the situation.
While the extent of the damage to the nuclear facilities is still being assessed, Israeli officials regard the achievements of the campaign as “very significant”, said one person familiar with the government’s thinking.
“It’s a good time to quit,” said another, adding that Israeli officials wanted to turn their “military achievements into diplomatic achievements”.
The diplomat briefed on the talks said there were no “major conditions” to the ceasefire other than a halt to the fighting, but the next issue will be whether the US and Iran resume talks to resolve the nuclear stand-off with the Islamic republic, which lies at the root of the crisis.
Another person familiar with Israeli government thinking confirmed that the Netanyahu administration had been seeking a straightforward end to the hostilities — “we’ll stop, and they’ll stop” — after which it wanted to see a renewed diplomatic push by the international community on Iran’s nuclear programme.
Trump said the US strikes on Sunday had “completely and fully obliterated” Iran’s two main nuclear facilities — Fordow and Natanz.
For Netanyahu, Trump’s military intervention was crucial in allowing him to claim his objectives had been met, as Israel lacked the military firepower to cause significant damage to Fordow, which is buried deep beneath a mountain and is the main site where Iran was producing highly enriched uranium.
But the full extent of the damage is still not clear. Neither are the whereabouts of the 400kg of uranium that Iran has enriched close to weapons grade, with the prospect that it was moved before the attacks on its plants.
There had been an earlier push for a ceasefire last week when Qatar’s Sheikh Mohammed held talks with Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi in Istanbul on Thursday, the diplomat said.
That diplomatic effort was upset by the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear plants, and there were no further talks until Monday night.
Now, the focus will return to the nuclear talks. In a sign of the challenges ahead, Iran’s atomic energy chief Mohammad Eslami said on Tuesday that there would be no pause in the regime’s nuclear activities.
