Iran | Pakistan

Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi reaffirmed Pakistan’s strong condemnation of the recent attack on Iran, expressing full support for Tehran’s right to defend itself.

Federal Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi arrived in Iran on an official visit, where he was warmly received at Imam Khomeini International Airport by Iranian Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni.

QUETTA: Iran Air plans to launch direct weekly passenger and cargo flights from Quetta to the Iranian cities of Zahidan and Mashhad in a move aimed at boosting trade and travel between the neighbouring countries, an Iranian diplomat announced on Saturday. The new air service will help facilitate commerce, reduce travel time and costs for traders, and strengthen bilateral ties, said Ali Reza Rajai, Iran’s acting consul general in Quetta. The announcement was made at a ceremony organised by the Pak-Iran Joint Chamber of Commerce. The flights are intended “to facilitate trade and travel between Pakistan and Iran,” Rajai said, stressing the need for stronger cooperation. Top officials from the airline, including Iran Air Chief Agha Karimi and Deputy Chief Agha Ismail, were also in attendance. Mr Rajai said the new service would be critical for enhancing port-to-port cooperation between Pakistan’s Gwadar Port and Iran’s Chabahar Port. He called for bureaucratic hurdles to be removed to improve bilateral business, ...

A United Kingdom parliamentary committee on Thursday blamed Iran for at least 15 attempts to kill or kidnap British-based individuals since 2022, saying the threat from Iran had “significantly increased”. London’s response has been too focused on “crisis management”, said parliament’s intelligence and security committee, with concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme dominating their attention too much. Tehran swiftly issued a “categorical rejection of the unfounded, politically motivated and hostile allegations”. The committee’s claims were “baseless, irresponsible, and reflective of a broader pattern of distortion intended to malign Iran’s legitimate regional and national interests”, said its London embassy. The report comes after growing alarm in Britain at alleged Iranian targeting of dissidents, media organisations and journalists in the UK, including accusations of physical attacks. Iran in March became the first country to be placed on an enhanced tier of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme, which a...

Iran’s foreign minister has held talks with Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, the Saudi foreign ministry said, two weeks after a ceasefire between regional rivals Iran and Israel began. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said his country hoped the truce would contribute to regional stability, and emphasised Riyadh’s position “in supporting dialogue through diplomatic means as a path to resolving disputes,” the ministry said in a post on X early on Wednesday. According to the Saudi ministry, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi “expressed his gratitude” to Riyadh for its condemnation of Israel’s attacks on Iran last month. Israel launched its unprecedented bombing campaign on Iran on June 13, targeting military and nuclear facilities as well as residential areas. The strikes killed more than 1,000 people in Iran, including senior military commanders and nuclear scientists, according to Tehran. Israel, in turn, was hit by waves of drone and missile fire from Iran, which Israeli authorities said left at lea...

Iran said on Tuesday it has not made any request for talks with the United States, after President Donald Trump said Tehran was seeking negotiations following last month’s war with Israel. “No request for a meeting has been made on our side to the American side,” said Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei, according to Tasnim news agency. Trump said on Monday that Iran was seeking talks with the US and that they had been scheduled, without specifying the time or the location. “We have scheduled Iran talks. They want to talk,” Trump told reporters in the White House, where he was meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “They want to meet. They want to work something out. They’re very different now than they were two weeks ago.” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also reiterated Tehran’s position, rejecting talks at this stage. “Although Iran has in recent days received messages indicating that the US may be ready to return to negotiations, how can we trust further engagement...

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in an interview released on Monday that his country has “no problem” restarting nuclear talks with the United States, provided that trust can be reestablished between Washington and Tehran, and also accused Israel of attempting to assassinate him. The remarks, made during an interview with US journalist and former Trump confidante Tucker Carlson, came less than a month after Israel launched an unprecedented bombing campaign on June 13 against Iran and the US struck the Islamic republic’s nuclear facilities. The attacks took place days before Tehran and Washington were set to meet for a new round of nuclear talks, stalling negotiations that were aimed at reaching a deal over Iran’s atomic programme. “We see no problem in re-entering the negotiations,” the Iranian president said. “There is a condition … for restarting the talks. How are we going to trust the US again? “We re-entered the negotiations, then how can we know for sure that in the middle of the talks, the Isra...

Brics leaders at a summit on Sunday took aim at US President Donald Trump’s “indiscriminate” import tariffs and recent Israeli-US strikes on Iran. The 11 emerging nations — including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — account for about half the world’s population and 40 per cent of global economic output. The bloc is divided about much, but found common cause when it comes to the mercurial US leader and his stop-start tariff wars — even if it avoided naming him directly. Voicing “serious concerns about the rise of unilateral tariff” measures, Brics members said the tariffs risked hurting the global economy, according to a summit joint statement. Trump fired back at the bloc directly on social media on Sunday night. “Any country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of Brics will be charged an additional 10 per cent Tariff. There will be no exceptions to this policy,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. Earlier, Brics also offered symbolic backing to fellow member Iran, condemn...

UNICEF calls Afghan return an emergency, with 1.4M returning from Iran, Pakistan amid chronic returnee crisis

The federal government has decided to enhance travel facilities for pilgrims heading to Iran and Iraq by increasing the number of flights and introducing a ferry service.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has said the army must draw up a plan to prevent Iran from threatening Israel again after the arch-foes fought a 12-day war last month, in comments released on Friday. “The Israeli military’s current mission is to prepare an enforcement plan to ensure that Iran cannot threaten Israel again,” Katz said at a meeting with military leaders on Thursday, according to a statement released by his ministry. “The army must prepare on the intelligence and operational level to ensure that the air force maintains air superiority over Tehran, the ability to enforce restrictions on Iran and prevent it from rebuilding its capabilities,” he added. Israel launched a bombing campaign against Iran on June 13 following a decades-long shadow war, saying it aimed to prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon — an ambition Tehran has consistently denied — and degrade its ballistic missile arsenal. Following a US-announced ceasefire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to prevent Iran...

WASHINGTON: The US has imposed sanctions on six companies and multiple vessels said to be involved in the sale and transport of Iranian petroleum and petrochemical products — including a firm based in India and another in Pakistan — as part of its continuing campaign to intensify economic pressure on Tehran. The designations, announced by the State Department and the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), target a network of shipping and management firms accused of helping Iran covertly move oil and petrochemicals in violation of US sanctions. The latest measures come weeks after Israeli and US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and reflect Washington’s resolve to enforce the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” policy. “The Treasury will continue to target Tehran’s revenue sources and intensify economic pressure to disrupt the regime’s access to the financial resources that fuel its destabilizing activities,” said US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a statement. Among those sanctioned...

A senior Iranian diplomat said on Thursday his country remains open to diplomacy provided the United States offers guarantees it will not resort to military action against the Islamic Republic. The remarks came as US news website Axios, citing two unidentified sources, reported that White House Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was planning to meet Iran’s foreign minister and chief negotiator, Abbas Araghchi, in Oslo next week. Neither Tehran nor Washington confirmed the Axios report, which said a final date for the talks has yet to be set. “We are for diplomacy,” Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Majid Takht-Ravanchi told NBC News, adding that the US should “convince us that they are not going to use military force while we are negotiating”. “That is an essential element for our leadership to be in a position to decide about the future round of talks,” he added. Tehran and Washington had held five rounds of nuclear talks since April 12 and were set to hold a new round two days before Israel launched a bombing ca...

Iran on Wednesday formally suspended its cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog, a measure drawn up in the wake of unprecedented Israeli and US strikes on the Islamic republic’s nuclear sites. The war between Iran and Israel, which broke out on June 13 and lasted for 12 days, has intensified tensions between Tehran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). On June 25, a day after a ceasefire took hold, Iranian lawmakers overwhelmingly voted in favour of the bill to suspend cooperation with the agency. State media said today that the legislation had cleared the final hurdle and was in effect. The text, published by Iranian media, states that the legislation aims to “ensure full support for the inherent rights of the Islamic Republic of Iran” under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and “especially uranium enrichment”. The issue of enrichment was at the core of disagreements between Washington and Tehran in nuclear negotiations that had been derailed by the war. Israel and some Western countries h...

Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin on Tuesday spoke by telephone for the first time in over two-and-a-half years, with the French president urging a ceasefire in Ukraine but the Russian leader hitting back that the West was to blame for the conflict. One week after a ceasefire ended Israel’s 12-day war with Iran, the two […]

Diplomatic talks between Washington and Tehran cannot resume unless the US rules out further strikes on Iran, its deputy foreign minister told the BBC late Sunday. Majid Takht-Ravanchi told the British broadcaster that the US had signalled it wants to return to the negotiating table, a week after it struck three Iranian nuclear facilities. “We have not agreed to any date, we have not agreed to the modality,” said Takht-Ravanchi. “Right now we are seeking an answer to this question. Are we going to see a repetition of an act of aggression while we are engaging in dialogue?” The US needed to be “quite clear on this very important question”, he said. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said he was not offering Iran anything nor talking to it “since we totally obliterated” the country’s nuclear facilities. “I am not offering Iran anything, unlike Obama,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. The two countries were in talks over Tehran’s nuclear programme when Israel hit Iranian nuclear sites and military inf...

More than 230,000 Afghans left Iran in June, most of them deported, as returns surge ahead of a Tehran-set deadline, the United Nations migration agency said on Monday. From June 1-28, 233,941 people returned from Iran to Afghanistan, International Organisation for Migration spokesman Avand Azeez Agha told AFP, with 131,912 returns recorded in the week of June 21-28 alone. “In total, from 1 January to 28 June 2025, 691,049 people have returned, 70 percent of whom were forcibly sent back,” he said. The number of returnees surged in recent weeks, as Afghans reported increased deportations and pressure to leave ahead of a July 6 deadline announced by Iran in May for Afghans without documents to leave the country. For several days last week, the number reached 30,000 per day, the IOM said. Figures have remained around 6-7,000 in recent days, Taliban border authorities and the UN said, with the numbers expected to increase ahead of the deadline.

ISLAMABAD - National Assembly Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq on Thursday condemned Israel’s recent attack on Iran, called it a violation of international law and reiterated Pakistan’s support for the Iranian government and people during a meeting with Iranian Ambassador Reza Amiri Moghadam at Parliament House.

In the early 2010s, Iran believed that a war waged against it by Israel, which would pull in the United States, was an inevitability. At the time, American newspapers were warning that Israel was on the verge of bombing Iran, the IAEA was working hand in glove with the Americans to increase pressure on the Persians, and the country was being suffocated by sanctions that were only looking to get worse. The Iranians, according to political analyst Trita Parsi, made a strategic calculation at the time — that the war would come and it would devastate them, but it would also destroy the Americans. In this book, Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy, Parsi notes that Iranian officials thought the Iraq war had already turned the US into a ‘limping giant’, that another war in the region would end its superpower status, and that it would no longer be able to dominate the Middle East. Sure, they ventured, Iran would be ruined by the war, but they placed their hope on the longevity of Persia as a ci...

TEHRAN: Iran currently has no plan to meet with the United States, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on Thursday in an interview on state TV, contradicting U.S. President Donald Trump’s statement that Washington planned to have talks with Tehran next week. The Iranian foreign minister said Tehran was assessing whether talks with the U.S. were […]