US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will meet with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Geneva on Thursday for an additional round of nuclear talks, sources told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.
The talks, once again mediated by Oman, will likely include International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Rafael Grossi, who participated in the previous round.
Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad al-Busaidi was “pleased to confirm US-Iran negotiations are now set for Geneva this Thursday, with a positive push to go the extra mile toward finalizing the deal,” he wrote on X/Twitter.
Axios, citing senior American officials, initially reported that US negotiators would hold another round of talks with Iran on Friday if they received “a detailed Iranian proposal for a nuclear deal in the next 48 hours.
The Iranians are expected to present their proposal to the Americans before Thursday’s meeting, to discuss it after senior Trump administration officials have reviewed it. The US is demanding that Iran come forward with a comprehensive and meaningful plan on the nuclear issue, including significant concessions.
Busaidi met with Witkoff and Kushner ahead of the indirect US-Iran talks in Geneva on February 17.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian posted that Iran was “closely monitoring developments on the US side and has made all necessary preparations for any possible scenario.”
“The recent negotiations with the United States led to an exchange of practical proposals and yielded encouraging signals,” he added.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened a meeting with senior defense officials and a small number of ministers, followed by a Security Cabinet session.
Israeli officials continue to assess that the chances of a deal remain slim, that the likelihood of a US military strike is higher, and that the Iranians are primarily trying to buy time.
What happened in last Iran-US nuclear talks?
In the nuclear talks in Geneva last week, Witkoff and Kushner told Araghchi that US President Donald Trump was maintaining a position of “zero enrichment” of uranium within Iran, but that the US was willing to consider a proposal that included “token enrichment” if Iran could prove that it would block every pathway to achieving a nuclear weapon, according to Axios.
This comes after Sen. Lindsey Graham told the outlet on Saturday that several people around Trump had been advising the president not to strike Iran. Graham has been urging the president to ignore this advice, Axios reported.
“I understand concerns about major military operations in the Middle East, given past entanglements. However, the voices who counsel against getting entangled seem to ignore the consequences of letting evil go unchecked,” Graham said.
The previous round of talks was productive, but significant gaps remain, several sources told the Post on Tuesday.
US Vice President JD Vance said Iran was not yet willing to acknowledge Trump’s “redlines,” particularly those regarding the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.
“In some ways it went well, they agreed to meet afterward, but in other ways it was very clear that the president has set some red lines that the Iranians are not yet willing to actually acknowledge and work through,” Vance told Fox News last week.
Iran could be close to enriching uranium for bomb-making material, US envoy Steve Witkoff claims
Iran could be close to enriching uranium for bomb-making material, Witkoff said.
He told Fox News on Saturday that Iran could theoretically be about a week away from being able to enrich its existing uranium to a weaponized level, though the envoy left out that Iran currently has no access to its material, no machines to enrich it, and no weapons program to use it for any operational purpose.
“They’re probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material. And that’s really dangerous. So they can’t have that,” Witkoff said on My View with Lara Trump, wanting to highlight the severity of the potential future nuclear issues should Iran rebuild all the other elements of its nuclear program, which were bombed in June.
In June, Israel and the US destroyed Iran’s entire fleet of 20,000 nuclear centrifuges, its entire multifaceted weaponization program, most of its three major nuclear sites, and dozens of minor nuclear sites. They also killed most of Iran’s leading nuclear scientists and caved in portions of its nuclear facilities, making it hard for the Islamic Republic to access its enriched uranium.
Yonah Jeremy Bob, Tobias Siegal, Lara Sukster Mosheyof, and Reuters contributed to this report.