Tehran Says It Is Awaiting US Reply After Trump Rejects Seven-Day Hormuz Proposal

Iran is waiting for an official response from Washington to its proposal for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, despite a public rejection from the US president, according to comments attributed to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. The exchange sets up a fresh impasse in a conflict that has already seen a formal US-Iran understanding and a subsequent return to strikes.

Araghchi said on Saturday that Tehran had still not received a formal answer to the proposal it submitted — an offer understood to have laid out a seven-day roadmap for ending hostilities and restoring shipping through the waterway. The foreign minister's remarks amount to a deliberate gap between what Iran says it is waiting for and what the White House has already said in public.

Trump, for his part, said the Iranian deal was not "acceptable," rejecting the seven-day plan in remarks that also dismissed Tehran's position, claiming the government is "losing so badly." Related Al Jazeera coverage described the document as a seven-day ceasefire proposal, with the Strait's reopening presented as its central element.

The disagreement comes against the backdrop of a broader, unsettled diplomatic record. Earlier coverage referenced a US-Iran memorandum of understanding signed on June 17, followed by a subsequent round of hostilities and renewed strikes — a sequence that has left the channel of communication technically open but substantively untrusted.

That distrust is now being voiced at the highest level in Tehran. President Pezeshkian has said Iran "no longer trusts talks with Washington," a pointed assessment from the country's head of state that suggests Tehran is unlikely to bank on goodwill from a resumption of negotiations.

The Strait of Hormuz itself is the practical heart of the dispute. The narrow waterway sits at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and carries a share of the world's seaborne oil that energy analysts have long put at roughly a fifth of global supply, making any interruption felt well beyond the region. Reopening it is therefore not a symbolic concession but a measure with immediate consequences for importers, insurers and shipping operators.

For Iran, control over transit through the strait is tied directly to its own economic position. Iran's export earnings have for years been shaped by sanctions and by the ability of foreign vessels to transit the waterway freely; closure or disruption raises the cost of selling energy and complicates Tehran's ability to earn revenue at all. That helps explain why an offer tied specifically to reopening the strait carried weight as a possible off-ramp.

For Washington and its allies, the stakes are equally concrete. A reopened channel would reduce the risk to commercial traffic, ease pressure on energy markets and remove one of the most dangerous flashpoints in the confrontation. Rejecting the proposal instead leaves in place the conditions that have repeatedly pulled the region back into escalation.

The sequence of events also highlights a recurring feature of the diplomacy: proposals move quietly for days while the two sides test each other's intentions, and a rejection delivered publicly can arrive before an official reply is ever sent. Araghchi's framing — still waiting for a response — preserves a diplomatic channel even as Trump's comments suggest the offer itself is effectively shelved.

Analysts watching the crisis say the central obstacle is no longer the wording of any single document but the collapse of confidence in the process that produced it. Once a government declares it does not trust the talks, even a technically acceptable framework becomes politically difficult for its own side to accept, and momentum built over weeks of negotiation can be lost in a single news cycle.

Iranian public messaging has continued to foreground the waterway. Photographs from Tehran show residents walking past billboards referring to the Strait of Hormuz, including an image taken on September 16, reflecting how central the issue has become in domestic political communication and state messaging.

What happens next is likely to be decided in the near term by three things: whether Washington sends the formal answer Tehran says it is still waiting for, whether military action escalates further, and whether the two governments can find a formula for verifying any halt to strikes. Until at least one of those shifts, the seven-day roadmap rejected by the US president appears to remain on the table only in the sense that it has not been withdrawn.

The developments were reported by Faisal Aziz Khan and Leena Fraihat for Al Jazeera's live coverage of the conflict, published on September 27, 2026, which also tracked separate questions about the Strait's status since the June 17 US-Iran understanding and the reasons strikes resumed.