• Khamenei tells southern neighbours told to choose “right side”.
• Adds Strait of Hormuz management to enter a new phase soon.
• Public urged to stay active despite ceasefire announcement.
  

TEHRAN: Iran’s new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei said in his latest written message that his nation did not want war with the United States and Israel, but would protect its rights as a nation, state television reported Thursday.

“We did not seek war and we do not want it,” he said in the message read out on state TV, weeks after his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was martyred on February 28, the first day of the war.

“But we will not renounce our legitimate rights under any circumstances, and in this respect, we consider the entire resistance front as a whole,” he added, in an apparent reference to Lebanon where Israel is fighting with Tehran’s ally Hezbollah.

“All must know that, by Almighty God’s will, we definitely won’t allow the criminal aggressors who attacked our country to go unpunished.”

Iran this week agreed to a fragile two-week ceasefire with the United States that could lead to peace negotiations after threats of annihilation from US President Donald Trump.

The supreme leader also urged the country’s southern neighbours to carefully observe ongoing regional developments, describing them as a “miracle” and calling for a clear and informed stance.

He said that Iran will move the management of the strategic Strait of Hormuz into a new phase.

Khamenei told Iranians that they must “not imagine that taking to the streets is no longer necessary” despite the announcement of the ceasefire.

“Your voices in public squares are undoubtedly influential in the outcome of the negotiations,” he said.

Likely wounded in the strike that martyred his father, Mojtaba Khamenei, has still not been seen in public since his leadership appointment.

He has issued written declarations, most of them read out by presenters on state television.

US President Donald Trump has even speculated that he could be dead, but Iran’s state television said he is recovering from his injuries and posts photos of him, without specifying when they were taken.

WASHINGTON: It was a war JD Vance never wanted. Now the US vice president has been tasked with ending it.

Vance heads to Pakistan this week with orders from President Donald Trump to turn the shaky Iran ceasefire into a lasting peace deal.

For the 41-year-old Vance, who has kept a notably low profile during the Middle East conflict, it will be one of the biggest moments of his career.

But the man widely regarded as a leading contender in the 2028 US presidential election will face huge challenges too when talks begin Saturday in Islamabad.

“I cannot think of a case where the vice president ran formal negotiations like this,” Aaron Wolf Mannes, a lecturer at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and an expert on the American vice presidency’s role in foreign policy, told AFP.

“This is high risk, high reward.”

Vance built his political brand as an avowed anti-interventionist who wanted to keep America out of any more foreign wars, like in Iraq, where he served as a US Marine.

That has made for a difficult balancing act after Trump launched the Iran war on February 28.

Vance has publicly backed the conflict but has kept out of the limelight. When the ceasefire was announced, Vance happened to be far away in Hungary, supporting Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s electoral campaign.

The New York Times reported this week that in discussions behind closed doors in the weeks before the war, Vance argued against military action, saying it could cause regional chaos and split Trump’s MAGA coalition.

But Vance now suddenly finds himself as Trump’s diplomatic closer for an Iran deal.

“My key role was, I sat on the phone a lot,” Vance told reporters as he left Hungary this week. “I answered a lot of phone calls. I made a lot of phone calls. And again, I’m happy about where we are.”

Announcing the Islamabad talks this week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Vance played a “very significant and key role in this since the very beginning.”

Not always diplomatic

Vance will be accompanied by special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner as he becomes the first US vice president to visit Pakistan since Joe Biden in 2011.

The White House said Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Witkoff and Kushner “have always been collaborating on these issues.”

“The President is optimistic that a deal can be reached that can lead to lasting peace in the Middle East,” Principal Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement to AFP.

One theory is that the Iranians may view Vance as a more likely partner for diplomacy given his widely reported opposition to the war, and general doubts about US interventionism.

After Tehran expressed fury over Israel’s continued attacks on Lebanese cities despite the ceasefire deal, Vance appeared to take a softer tone, saying there may have been a “legitimate misunderstanding” from Iran that Lebanon would be included.

He hasn’t always been so diplomatic.

A long-term sceptic of support for Ukraine, Vance notoriously kicked off the Oval Office row between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky in February 2025.

And for the ambitious Vance, a soon-to-be father of four and Catholic convert, politics is always in the background.

Since Trump’s return to power, Vance has been unusually prominent in a tough job that is simultaneously one heartbeat away from the presidency yet also, in the words of one former veep, “not worth a bucket of warm spit.”

His crucial role in the Iran talks comes against the backdrop of a looming potential battle with Rubio to be the Republican heir to Trump in two years’ time.

“If he can get something that papers it over without dealing with real issues, that’s probably enough,” said Mannes.

“But if nothing good comes of this, it raises questions about his competence, which is not going to help him electorally. And of course Rubio’s right there as a potential rival for 2028.”

Some of Lebanon’s hospitals could run out of life-saving trauma medical kits within days as supplies near depletion following mass casualties from large-scale Israeli strikes over the past day, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Thursday.

The life-saving trauma kits include bandages, antibiotics and anaesthetics to treat patients who sustained war-related injuries, the WHO stated.

“Some of the trauma management supplies were in short (supply) and we may run out in a few days,” Dr Abdinasir Abubakar, the WHO’s representative in Lebanon, told Reuters.

Israel bombed more targets in Lebanon on Thursday after its biggest attacks of the war on its neighbour on Wednesday killed more than 250 people and more than 1,000 were injured.

“If we have another mass casualty, like what happened yesterday, it will be a disaster,” Abubakar said.

“Probably we will lose more lives just because we don’t have enough supplies,” he added.

Shortages of supplies of trauma kits have been driven by a surge in recent casualties — the majority of whom are civilians — with roughly three weeks’ worth of supplies being depleted in one day, Abubakar stated.

Costs surge

Medicines to treat patients with chronic disease, such as insulin for diabetes patients, could also run out within weeks after supply chains were disrupted by the war in the Gulf and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Abubakar said.

Delivery costs of medical supplies into Lebanon have surged three times, while the WHO also faces constrained funding, he added.

The WHO said it and the Lebanese Ministry of Health were planning to move supplies between hospitals to avoid total depletion of stocks, but cautioned that the health system is being stretched to its limit.

More than one million people have been displaced across Lebanon since the conflict began on March 2, following joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran in late February, according to the United Nations.