ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Friday that a ceasefire in Lebanon and the release of Iran’s blocked assets must be fulfilled before negotiations with the United States begin in Islamabad on Saturday.
“Two of the measures mutually agreed upon between the parties have yet to be implemented: a ceasefire in Lebanon and the release of Iran’s blocked assets,” he said in a post on X, adding that “these two matters must be fulfilled before negotiations begin.”
Ghalibaf made the remarks shortly after US Vice President JD Vance boarded a plane to Islamabad for talks on turning a two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran into a permanent truce to end the war between the US, Israel and Iran.
The war extended to Lebanon in early March after the Iran-backed Hezbollah launched an initial attack on Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s longtime supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who was killed alongside other senior officials during US-Israeli strikes in Tehran on February 28, which marked the onset of the war.
Unblocking frozen Iranian assets had not previously been publicly set as a precondition for talks, although full sanctions relief is among Iran's 10 demands. The exact value of Iran’s frozen assets remains unclear, but several estimates place the total at over $100 billion.
"If they're going to try to play us, then they're going to find the negotiating team is not that receptive," Vance told reporters before flying to Islamabad.
Since the truce was first announced on Wednesday, Iran has maintained that it included Lebanon, where Israel's war has killed nearly 1,900 people since the start of March.