Iranian negotiators in Doha for third day of Qatari-mediated talks as seven-day trust plan is weighed
Iranian negotiators were in Doha on Sunday for a third consecutive day of talks with Qatari mediators aimed at ending the war involving Iran, the United States and Israel, as a Qatari seven-day trust-building proposal and a rival Iranian plan remain on the table.
Iranian negotiators were in Doha on Sunday for a third consecutive day of talks with Qatari mediators, in the latest effort to find a way out of a war involving Iran, the United States and Israel that has now run for eight months. An official briefed on the discussions told Reuters that the talks were aimed at pushing for a deal to end the conflict, and that the Qatari mediation was being coordinated through regular contacts with Washington.
The sequence of the talks helps explain why this round matters. Qatari mediators were in Tehran on Friday for discussions with Iranian officials, and those discussions lasted more than twelve hours, according to the official briefed on the negotiations. The talks then moved to Doha on Saturday, and were still continuing on Sunday. That pattern — a long session in the Iranian capital followed by consecutive days in the Qatari capital — suggests a process that is being worked through step by step rather than a single meeting that either succeeds or fails.
At the centre of the current discussion is a Qatari proposal for a seven-day plan. According to the official briefed on the negotiations, the Qataris brought the proposal to Tehran a week ago. Under it, the United States and Iran would take daily steps over seven days to build trust, ahead of broader peace talks. A senior Iranian official told Reuters on Friday that the proposal was not deemed satisfactory by Tehran, which means the plan as drafted has not been accepted, even as the talks around it continue.
Iran has its own seven-day plan, which it has been proposing since September. That plan, as described in the reporting, calls for Washington to lift a blockade of Iranian ports, unfreeze assets and approve an Iranian-backed route through the Strait of Hormuz, after which the contested strait would be reopened. The Iranian plan has so far been rejected by President Donald Trump. The existence of two rival seven-day frameworks — one Qatari, one Iranian — is one reason the talks are slow: the two sides are not only arguing about an eventual settlement, but about the sequence of first steps that would make such a settlement credible.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said in remarks reported by Al Jazeera on Saturday that Iran was studying a letter from US Vice President JD Vance, and that the Iranian plan was the only proposal on the table to reopen the strait. Vance led the US delegation at previous rounds of talks with Iran, and the letter was described by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal as an initiative to see whether talks could be restarted. Trump has played the letter down, saying he approved it only to discuss the possibility of letting more medical supplies into Iran, adding that it was about getting supplies in to help people who are not well.
The talks are taking place against a hard deadline in American politics. The United States holds midterm elections on Tuesday, 3 November, and Trump has said the United States will not launch new attacks on Iran before the vote, while also saying that talks with Tehran have been productive. He has not ruled out further military action after the vote, and countries across the region have been anticipating that he could restart attacks once voting is over. That timetable gives the Doha talks an urgency they might not otherwise have: both sides know the political calendar may change the calculation within days.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking on Saturday while hosting foreign ministers of the G20 major economies in Atlanta, said Trump had not decided whether to launch new strikes against Iran, but would prefer to resolve the conflict diplomatically. Rubio declined to set a timeframe for the talks in Qatar, but said direct and indirect contacts with Iran were under way. “There are multiple talks. Talks have actually never stopped,” he said, adding that Trump would prefer a diplomatic solution but had expressed confidence that the United States would have the military ability to act if it needed to.
From Tehran, the public messaging has been sharply different in tone. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei issued a statement on Saturday ordering the armed forces to be prepared to respond to any attack, saying that any level or type of threat must be met with an immediate, impactful and geographically unrestricted response. Khamenei said senior commanders had reported high readiness along the Gulf coast, in and around the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman, and on Iran’s north-western and south-eastern borders. The Iranian military later announced it was taking steps to improve its readiness.
Iran’s influential security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, added another layer to the picture, saying Tehran was debating whether to lift its longstanding ban on nuclear weapons should hostilities resume, although he said no such decision had been taken. He also said there could be no talks on Iran’s nuclear programme unless Washington accepted Iran’s demands. That comment matters because it links the immediate question — whether fighting resumes after the midterms — to a much larger one about Iran’s nuclear posture, and it suggests that even a ceasefire discussion cannot be separated from the nuclear issue for long.
What happens next therefore depends on several moving parts at once. The Doha talks could narrow the gap between the Qatari and Iranian seven-day plans, or they could stall while each side waits to see what happens after the US elections. Trump’s promise not to attack before the vote gives diplomacy a short window, but his refusal to rule out action afterwards keeps the threat in view. And Khamenei’s order to prepare an unrestricted response, alongside Rezaei’s nuclear remarks, signals that Tehran is preparing for the possibility that the window closes. For now, the fact that negotiators are still in Doha on a third day is itself the news: the channel is open, even if the deal is not yet in sight.
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