Draft Iran–US Deal Would Move Uranium Abroad and Reopen Hormuz in Seven Days as Strikes Loom After Midterms

A preliminary draft framework for ending the eight-month war between the United States and Iran would see Tehran move its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to a third country and reopen the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping within seven days of an initial understanding, according to a draft obtained by Al Arabiya English and reported on Saturday.

The document, described by the Saudi-owned channel as a set of key points rather than a signed agreement, pairs far-reaching limits on Iran’s nuclear programme with phased American steps to ease sanctions, lift the naval blockade of Iranian ports and relax other economic restrictions. China is identified as a possible guarantor of the deal’s implementation and durability, and direct talks between American and Iranian negotiators would take place in Doha rather than Istanbul, according to Al Arabiya English.

The reported framework surfaced on the same day that a Qatari newspaper, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, claimed a breakthrough in the indirect negotiations and said an American delegation was expected in Doha for direct talks with Iranian officials. The Times of Israel, citing that report, said the two sides had agreed on preliminary measures covering Iran’s nuclear programme, navigation through the Strait of Hormuz and financial incentives for Tehran, with China and Russia expected to act as guarantors.

Neither Washington nor Tehran has confirmed the draft, and no government or mediator has publicly confirmed that a breakthrough has been reached. The reports themselves disagree on details — the Al Arabiya draft names China alone as a possible guarantor, while the Al-Araby Al-Jadeed account names both China and Russia, and where one version speaks of measures already agreed, the other frames the same clauses as options under examination. What is not in doubt is that diplomacy has accelerated sharply in the past 48 hours, and that it is now running against a clock set by the American midterm elections on 3 November.

Qatari mediators spent more than 12 hours in talks with Iranian officials in Tehran on Friday, remaining in regular contact with the White House throughout, according to Axios. The Iranian negotiating team then travelled back to Doha with the Qatari delegation, where discussions were due to resume on Saturday, the Times of Israel reported. A diplomatic source told Axios that the talks had made “positive progress”.

At the same time, the military machinery for a very different outcome is visibly moving. Israeli public broadcaster KAN reported that at least 10 American military cargo aircraft had landed at the Ovda and Nevatim air bases in Israel, with additional aircraft sent to bases in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, according to reports carried by Al Bawaba. An Israeli official told KAN that both countries were preparing for whatever decision President Donald Trump makes, while stressing that no decision had yet been taken.

American officials have also advised regional partners to prepare for possible renewed operations after the US elections, and for Iranian retaliation against energy facilities and critical infrastructure, according to Associated Press reporting cited by Alhurra. And, according to EA WorldView, the Trump camp is warning of possible strikes on Iran as early as 4 November, the day after the midterms, citing three senior Gulf Arab officials familiar with the discussions. The officials said the strikes were expected to be brief but intense, and that Gulf states were pressing the Trump administration against renewed attacks, calling for de-escalation amid fears of Iranian retaliation. One official said they “would not be surprised” if some Gulf countries opposed the use of American military bases on their territory. A White House official declined to discuss the matter, saying, “We do not comment on sensitive military plans that may or may not exist.”

Mr Trump himself struck a calmer note on Friday, telling reporters at the White House: “There are talks. They want to talk. They keep talking. We have time, frankly.” Speaking to a Kansas City radio station earlier in the day, he said he believed the war would end soon, while repeating Washington’s demand for assurances that Tehran would never obtain a nuclear weapon.

The shape of a possible bargain

Under the draft framework reported by Al Arabiya English, Iran would accept constraints on two fronts at once: its nuclear activities and its conduct at sea. On the nuclear file, Tehran would either transfer its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to an agreed third country or reduce the level at which it enriches uranium going forward. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, told a United Nations Security Council meeting on Tuesday that Iran had not provided the information and access needed to verify its previously declared nuclear material, including 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, and that the agency had identified no activity to repair or rebuild facilities damaged in the attacks of 2025 and 2026 since June 2025.

On the maritime front, the Strait of Hormuz would be reopened to international vessels within seven days of an initial understanding being reached. That is the most time-sensitive element of the whole document: the strait carries about a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and liquefied natural gas, and it has been the central theatre of the war since the United States and Israel began launching attacks on Iran on 28 February. Iran has restricted traffic through the waterway, demanded that vessels use a designated route and coordinate passage with its armed forces, and attacked ships that used a southern corridor closer to Oman’s shores, which Tehran calls unauthorised.

In return, the United States would take clearly defined steps to ease sanctions, end the naval blockade of Iranian ports — now in its third week — and relax other economic restrictions. Crucially, neither side would be required to make major concessions without receiving corresponding commitments that could be independently verified. An independent verification mechanism would assess compliance before each subsequent phase of implementation, and a separate dispute-resolution process involving mediators and guarantor states would address delays or alleged violations, with the explicit aim of preventing disagreements from spiralling back into military confrontation.

The draft’s central elements overlap with proposals already being discussed through Qatari mediation. Reuters reported earlier this week that Qatar had presented Iran with a seven-day sequence of reciprocal confidence-building measures, while Tehran said the ideas were unacceptable in their existing form. Iran itself proposed a seven-day plan to end the war in September. The new draft appears to be an attempt to give that loose idea a concrete, verifiable shape.

The sequencing dispute that has blocked every deal so far

The main obstacle, as every previous round of talks has shown, is the order in which things happen. Washington wants nuclear concessions to be part of the process from the outset, according to a US official cited by Axios, and wants Iran to dispatch negotiators empowered to discuss and resolve the nuclear issue. Tehran, by contrast, has insisted that discussion of the nuclear programme can only follow agreement on the Strait of Hormuz and financial terms such as the lifting of US sanctions. Iran has also demanded the release of frozen funds and permission to sell oil.

Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, one of Iran’s lead negotiators alongside Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, has said progress requires acceptance of Iran’s seven conditions and has rejected a “carrot-and-stick” approach. Iranian hardliners around the Supreme National Security Council have rejected any sequencing that places nuclear issues at the start of talks. A previous understanding involving the reopening of Hormuz and subsequent nuclear negotiations collapsed, deepening Tehran’s distrust of Washington’s implementation commitments.

The draft framework tries to solve this by making everything simultaneous and verified: each Iranian step is matched by a defined American step, and neither side moves to the next phase until independent verification confirms the last one. It is an elegant design on paper. Whether it survives contact with two governments that have spent eight months bombing each other is another matter entirely.

The human channel for the diplomacy is Vice President J.D. Vance, who wrote last week to Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, to test whether there was common ground to avoid renewed American strikes. The letter, delivered on Sunday through Qatari mediators, called for direct talks and offered for Mr Vance to lead the American delegation, proposing that Iran’s nuclear programme be put on the table from the outset. Iranian media said Tehran had received the letter but had not yet replied, although an Iranian official said leaders received the proposal positively. Mr Rezaei was expected to reply formally by Thursday. A US official cited by Axios said the administration believed Mr Rezaei, who is in contact with Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, was the best option for talks to avoid a resumption of strikes. Mr Trump, for his part, denied that Mr Vance had been instructed to pursue a resumption of talks, saying, “No, the issue is that they need help, including medical equipment and various other items,” before adding, “If you want to do it, that’s fine.”

A region bracing for both outcomes

Saudi Arabia, the country with the most to lose from a renewed round of fighting, has been urging Washington to give diplomacy more time, according to reports on Friday. Riyadh’s fear is specific and well-founded: Iranian retaliation would fall first on Gulf energy infrastructure. On Thursday, Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis said they had attacked several sites in Saudi Arabia, including its largest oil refinery at Ras Tanura, the Rabigh refinery and an Aramco facility at Abqaiq, while a Saudi-led coalition said it had intercepted a cruise missile launched towards the kingdom’s western region, according to Reuters. The Houthis denied a separate claim that they had launched a drone over the holy city of Mecca.

The risk is serious enough that the United States ordered non-emergency government employees and their family members to leave Saudi Arabia effective 23 October, the US embassy in Riyadh said on Friday, citing Houthi attacks on civilian airports and other critical infrastructure. American government employees now require special authorisation to use Saudi airports, and the embassy warned US citizens of potential further attacks, airspace closures and flight cancellations, according to Reuters.

Oil markets are already pricing in the danger. Brent crude returned to its highest level since April, at $117.72 a barrel, up almost 3 per cent on the day, according to EA WorldView, amid the attacks on tankers and the prospect of renewed American strikes. The price has climbed through October as the fighting around Hormuz has intensified.

That fighting has not stopped while the diplomats talk. On Thursday, a limpet-mine attack disabled the Panama-flagged, Dubai-owned tanker Louise 1 about 25 nautical miles north-east of Oman’s Khasab, starting a fire in the engine room; the crew were safe and the vessel later resumed its voyage. On Friday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said three oil tankers, including a supertanker carrying more than two million barrels of crude, had struck naval mines and caught fire in the strait, claims the United States disputed and which have not been independently verified. Oman’s navy evacuated 25 crew members from the Panama-flagged merchant ship RITI after it was attacked and caught fire off the Musandam coast. The US military, for its part, says it has cleared the strait’s internationally recognised primary shipping lanes of mines and kept them open, with more than 900 million barrels of crude moved through the waterway since early May, according to a Central Command spokesperson.

The United States has also warned shippers against paying tolls or “donations” to Iran for passage through the strait. An advisory from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control on Friday said any shippers paying such fees risked being sanctioned, and noted that Iran might seek payment in fiat currency, digital assets, offsets or informal swaps, according to Al Jazeera. Iranian state media, meanwhile, reported that Tehran had sent a new proposal for a lasting ceasefire to the Trump administration. A White House spokesperson, Anna Kelly, declined to confirm receipt, saying the administration did not “detail private diplomatic conversations”.

The war itself has now run for 247 days, and its costs are mounting on every side. The Pentagon has told US legislators that the cost of the war reached $47.1 billion by 16 October, with bombs, missiles and other munitions accounting for more than 60 per cent of the total, and analysts saying the true figure is likely much higher. Iran’s economy is under severe strain: the annual point-to-point inflation rate has reached 88.7 per cent, according to the Statistical Center of Iran, and Mr Trump has claimed Tehran is struggling even to pay its military personnel and police officers. In Yemen, where the war has opened a second front, the United Nations says more than 281,000 people have been displaced by fighting since the beginning of August.

Regional diplomacy has been running in parallel. Pakistan’s military, through Field Marshal Asim Munir, has been mediating alongside Saudi Arabia and Türkiye under the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed in August, and a high-level delegation visited Tehran this week. Foreign ministers from four European and four regional states met last Thursday to try to avert a renewal of American and Israeli strikes. Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi has said he believed the Trump administration understood that the region was moving towards a security and non-aggression pact. And in Israel, where elections on 27 October left Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc short of a parliamentary majority, the political uncertainty adds another variable to a week in which every decision in Washington is filtered through the midterm campaign.

Analysis: Why It Matters

1. This is the first detailed blueprint, not just a rumour of talks

For eight months, reports of a possible deal have been vague: a phone call here, a letter there, a mediator shuttling between capitals. The draft reported by Al Arabiya English is different in kind. It names the trade — uranium for sanctions relief, Hormuz for the blockade — sets a seven-day clock on the most urgent item, builds in verification before each phase, and names a guarantor. Even if the document turns out to be a mediator’s working paper rather than a text both sides have accepted, it tells the world what a deal would actually look like. That matters because it gives every capital, every oil trader and every shipping company a concrete yardstick against which to judge the next few days. The question is no longer whether a deal is possible in the abstract; it is whether these specific terms can be agreed before the deadline runs out.

2. The sequencing trap is the whole war in miniature

Every failed round of talks in this conflict has foundered on the same rock: who moves first. Washington wants the nuclear file opened immediately, because that is the core American demand and the reason the war began. Tehran wants the blockade lifted first, because that is the pressure squeezing its economy and the leverage it holds over the strait is the only card it has left. The draft’s answer — phased, reciprocal, verified steps — is the textbook solution to exactly this problem, and it is also the solution that has failed before, when a previous understanding on Hormuz and nuclear talks collapsed amid mutual accusations of bad faith. The design is sound; the trust is not. That is why the verification mechanism and the dispute-resolution process are not bureaucratic footnotes but the heart of the document. Without a referee both sides believe, the phases will never get past the first one.

3. The guarantor question reveals who really holds power now

The suggestion that China could guarantee an American-Iranian agreement would have been unthinkable a decade ago, and it is the most revealing clause in the draft. It reflects a simple reality: Beijing is one of the few capitals that talks to both Washington and Tehran, buys Iranian oil, and has the economic weight to make guarantees meaningful. The Al-Araby Al-Jadeed version adds Russia as a second guarantor, which would make the arrangement a genuinely multipolar one, with the two countries most hostile to American power underwriting a deal America itself would sign. That is a measure of how far the old order has shifted. It also creates a new risk: a deal guaranteed by China and Russia is a deal that Washington’s hawks will describe as a surrender of American leverage, and that description may matter more in the midterm campaign than anything in the text.

4. The 4 November date is doing more work than any clause in the draft

Nothing in the draft explains why it appeared this weekend, but the calendar does. The American midterm elections fall on 3 November, and the Trump camp is warning of strikes as early as the day after. That creates a deadline that diplomacy has never had before in this war, and it cuts both ways. For the mediators, it concentrates minds: a deal must be reached before the strikes begin, or not at all. For the hawks, it creates a window in which military action carries no electoral cost. And for Iran, it creates a perverse incentive to stall until after the vote, in the hope that the political pressure for action fades — or to concede quickly, in the hope of removing the reason for it. The cargo aircraft landing in Israel are the physical form of that deadline: preparation that does not prove a decision has been taken, but that makes a decision possible at short notice. The next three days will show which of those pressures wins.

5. The Gulf’s fear is the real veto on war

Saudi Arabia’s quiet lobbying to delay strikes is not sentiment; it is self-preservation. The kingdom’s oil refineries at Ras Tanura, Rabigh and Abqaiq are already being targeted, its airports are under attack, and the United States has told its own non-emergency staff to leave. The Gulf states know that in any renewed exchange, they — not the American mainland — will absorb the retaliation. That is why one Gulf official told EA WorldView that some countries might refuse the use of American bases on their territory, a threat that would complicate any operation far more than any Iranian air defence. The draft deal’s seven-day Hormuz clause is, in this light, not just about shipping. It is about giving the Gulf a reason to believe that the war can end without their cities and refineries paying the price of its ending.

What to Watch Next

1. Whether an American delegation actually lands in Doha. The Al-Araby Al-Jadeed report says a US delegation is expected to join direct talks in the Qatari capital this weekend. If it happens, it will be the first direct American-Iranian negotiation since the war began, and the strongest evidence yet that the draft is a live text rather than a leak.
2. Mohsen Rezaei’s formal reply to J.D. Vance. The Iranian security chief was expected to answer the Vice President’s letter by Thursday. His reply — and whether it accepts the idea of empowered negotiators discussing the nuclear file — will show whether Tehran is ready to cross the sequencing line it has defended for eight months.
3. Movement after the midterms. The warning of strikes as early as 4 November is the clearest test of intent. Watch for further American aircraft movements, Central Command statements and any change in the US naval posture around the strait in the 48 hours after the polls close.
4. Oil and shipping. Brent crude at $117.72 is already pricing in a high risk of escalation. A confirmed deal, or a confirmed strike, would move it sharply in opposite directions; so would any new attack on a tanker in the strait, where the competing claims of the past two days remain unresolved.
5. Whether the guarantor question is settled. The difference between the Al Arabiya draft, which names China alone, and the Al-Araby Al-Jadeed account, which names China and Russia, is small on the page and large in politics. Whichever version survives will tell us who the real brokers of this deal are.

Sources

• Eastora News — Preliminary US-Iran framework proposes uranium transfer and Hormuz reopening (reporting the Al Arabiya English draft)
• EA WorldView — US War on Iran, Day 247: Trump camp threatens attacks on November 4
• Europe Says (Al Bawaba) — Speculation grows over renewed strikes on Iran as US aircraft arrive in Israel
• Desi Talk Chicago (ANI) — US delegation expected in Doha for direct Iran talks after reported breakthrough
• Reuters — Oil rises on supply concerns as Houthis attack Saudi Arabia