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Rejecting Trump Plan, Iran Calls for War Reparations in Ceasefire Counterproposal
"The end of the war will occur when Iran decides it should end, not when Trump envisions its conclusion," said an Iranian official.
Mar 25, 2026
Iranian state media reported Wednesday that Iran has rejected the Trump administration's 15-point ceasefire plan, and a senior official outlined five conditions for ending the war, which the US and Israel launched late last month.
As President Donald Trump sent thousands more troops to the Middle East, the ceasefire plan "was submitted to Iran by intermediaries from Pakistan, who have offered to host renewed negotiations between Washington and Tehran," The Associated Press reported early Wednesday, citing an unnamed source briefed on the US proposal.
As experts warn that a global recession could occur if Iran continues to restrict the flow of fossil fuels through the Strait of Hormuz, Reuters highlighted that elevated "oil prices sank about 5% on Wednesday after reports the United States had sent Iran a 15-point proposal aimed at ending the war."
However, "Iran has responded negatively to an American proposal aimed at ending the ongoing imposed war," according to the Iranian state-run Press TV, which spoke with a senior political-security official.
Characterizing previous negotiations with the US—including nuclear talks in the lead-up to the current war—as deceptive, the official said that "Iran will end the war when it decides to do so and when its own conditions are met."
In addition to the Iranian government's demands from the recent negotiations in Geneva, the official said, the five conditions under which Iran would now agree to end the war are:
- A complete halt to "aggression and assassinations" by the enemy;
- The establishment of concrete mechanisms to ensure that the war is not reimposed;
- Guaranteed and clearly defined payment of war damages and reparations;
- The conclusion of the war across all fronts and for all resistance groups involved throughout the region; and
- Iran's exercise of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz is and will remain Iran's natural and legal right, and it constitutes a guarantee for the implementation of the other party's commitments, and must be recognized.
A ceasefire is contingent upon acceptance of those conditions, and "no negotiations will be held prior to that," the official told Press TV. "The end of the war will occur when Iran decides it should end, not when Trump envisions its conclusion."
The Iranian government this week put the death toll from the US-Israeli assault at over 1,500. According to Reuters, the news agency of the US-based Human Rights Activists in Iran said at least 3,291 people, including 1,455 civilians, are dead. US and Israeli bombings have also damaged tens of thousands of civilian locations, including homes, schools, medical facilities, energy installations, courthouses, and United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization World Heritage sites.
There have also been civilian and military casualties across the region, including more than 1,000 people slaughtered in Israel's bombing of Lebanon, 16 killed in Israel, and 13 confirmed deaths of US service members, according to the AP.
Speaking at UN headquarters in New York on Wednesday, Secretary-General António Guterres renewed his call for the US and Israel to end their war on Iran, which he said is "out of control" and "has broken past the limits even leaders thought unimaginable."
"The world is staring down the barrel of a wider war, a rising tide of human suffering, and a deeper global economic shock. This has gone too far," Guterres said. "It is time to stop climbing the escalation ladder—and start climbing the diplomatic ladder, and return to full respect of international law."
"I have remained in close contact with many from the region and around the world. A number of initiatives for dialogue and peace are underway. They must succeed," he continued. "My message to the United States and Israel is that it is high time to end the war—as human suffering deepens, civilian casualties mount, and the global economic impact is increasingly devastating. My message to Iran is to stop attacking their neighbors that are not parties to the conflict."
The UN chief then turned to Lebanon, which he recently visited: "There, too, the war must stop. Hezbollah must stop launching attacks into Israel. And Israel must stop its military operations and strikes in Lebanon, which are hitting civilians the hardest. The Gaza model must not be replicated in Lebanon."
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The Costs of Trump's Unnecessary, Illegal War on Iran Keep Mounting
The US and Israel may have started this war, but it won’t be so easily ended. The damage done to Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine will be with us for a generation.
Mar 23, 2026
The costs associated with any war—losses of lives, treasure, and security—are to be expected. And so it is with the US-Israel war on Iran. It was unnecessary. It has been massive. And it has been waged without any clear objective or strategic purpose. Though only a few weeks old, and still too early to project how it will play out, early signs of this war’s costs and consequences are worrisome.
The amounts of weapons that the US and Israel have dropped on Iranian targets have had a devastating impact on Iran’s people and the country’s infrastructure and resources. It is difficult to imagine that this situation can be remedied any time soon. As a result, Iran, which was already struggling with a flagging economy and a reform-minded and restive population, will most likely endure years of political unrest met by massive repression.
Once illegally attacked by the US and Israel, instead of seeking support from neighboring Arab countries, Iran has struck out at them with a vengeance, destroying some of their infrastructure and economic resources. While the Arab Gulf states can recover, the fragile rapprochement that had been developing between them and Iran has been shattered and will not be easily rebuilt.
A disruption in the supply of oil and gas has resulted from Iran’s choking of the Straits of Hormuz and Israel’s and Iran’s bombings of oil and gas facilities on both sides of the Gulf. This has caused a steep rise in the price of fuel, a sharp decline in the stock market, and the loss of hundreds of billions in overall wealth of investments and pension funds. The war’s economic impacts will continue to reverberate throughout the remainder of the year.
This isn’t the first time that Israel or the US have looked at what they had done to these countries and their peoples and said, “Well, that’s finished,” only to find that the devastating toll of the losses they inflicted and dislocation they created produced a festering bitterness that didn’t dissipate in time.
Meanwhile, the excessive amounts of weaponry so far expended in the war has resulted in reported shortages in both the US and Israel, with President Donald Trump asking Congress to approve an additional $200 billion for the Pentagon and a substantial increase in Israel’s military assistance. As with Ukraine and Gaza, the only winners of this war appear to be the US arms manufacturers.
The damage done doesn’t stop there. The Lebanese Hezbollah forgot that Israel never plays by the rules. They responded to Israel’s murder of Iran’s Ayatollah—a spiritual leader for many Shi’a Muslims—by firing a few shells across their border. Despite the fact that Israel has daily violated its five-month-old ceasefire with Lebanon, Israel used Hezbollah’s shelling to launch a sustained and disproportionate attack on Lebanon. To date, Israel has killed over 1,000 Lebanese, has destroyed entire neighborhoods in Beirut, and has ordered almost one-quarter of Lebanon’s people to flee their homes, exacerbating existing sectarian divisions in the country. Israeli forces now appear to be preparing for a longer-term Israeli occupation of Lebanon’s south. This occupation will likely fare no better than the last time Israel attempted it from the late 1970s to 2000.
As if this weren’t enough, Israel’s far-right government has used the cover of war to consolidate annexation of the West Bank. Plans have been accelerated to evacuate and destroy Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley to build a “security wall.” Since the war began, the number of attacks by settlers (with the support of Israeli troops) on Palestinian villages has dramatically increased, now averaging 10 a day. These military and vigilante actions have involved deaths and injuries, land theft, and destruction of homes and properties (including orchards and livestock). While Israel’s intent to take full control of all of Palestine has been steadily proceeding in recent years, the actions of the past few weeks are making it all but irreversible.
Meanwhile, the Gaza genocide continues. The attention of the world may be focused elsewhere, but the nearly 2 million Palestinians who remain in that devastated strip continue to suffer from hunger, lack of proper shelter, sanitation, and medical and other essential support services. There is no way to understand the long-term impact this “hell on earth” existence will have on Gaza’s children. But an educated guess would be that it won’t be good.
At this point, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is strutting around as if he were the “Middle East Overlord.” At the same time, there are conflicting reports that the US is either attempting to “wind down” the war or to send ground troops to Iran to “finish the job.” Both are ill-founded. Whatever Trump’s intention, it is a fool’s errand. There is no winding down, nor is there a job to finish.
The US and Israel may have started this war, but it won’t be so easily ended. The damage done to Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine will be with us for a generation. This isn’t the first time that Israel or the US have looked at what they had done to these countries and their peoples and said, “Well, that’s finished,” only to find that the devastating toll of the losses they inflicted and dislocation they created produced a festering bitterness that didn’t dissipate in time. Beware the reckoning.
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Israel Defense Minister Deploys 'Gaza Model' in Lebanon, Ordering Destruction of Villages
One expert called the policy “an open admission of intent to commit ethnic cleansing.”
Mar 23, 2026
Israel is planning to use Gaza as a "model" for its expanding assault on Lebanon, its defense minister said on Sunday as he pledged to begin the demolition of homes in border villages.
In a statement Sunday, Defense Minister Israel Katz said he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the Israel Defense Forces to "immediately destroy all the bridges over the Litani River that are used for terrorist activity, in order to prevent the passage of Hezbollah terrorists and weapons southward."
He also said he'd ordered the military to "accelerate the destruction of Lebanese homes in the border villages in order to thwart threats to the Israeli settlements—in accordance with the Beit Hanoun and Rafah model in Gaza."
Dylan Williams, the vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, described the invocation of this "Gaza model" as "an open admission of intent to commit ethnic cleansing" in Lebanon.
The two cities Katz referred to were largely wiped off the map during the Gaza genocide.
Beit Hanoun, a city on the northeastern edge of the Gaza Strip, which once had a population of more than 50,000 people, had nearly all of its structures totally "flattened" by Israel's bombing and was totally depopulated, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in mid-2025. The far-right in Israel has pushed for Jewish Israeli settlers to move in and build settlements on the territory.
Rafah has been similarly devastated, with nearly 70% of the structures "wiped out" according to an October 2025 investigation by the Center for Information Resilience.
At the time that Israeli forces moved into Rafah in mid-2024, it was the last refuge for more than 1 million Palestinians who'd been displaced from their homes elsewhere in the strip. UN experts described the attack on Rafah as a culmination of a monthslong campaign to “forcibly transfer and destroy Gaza’s population," with more than 800,000 people being forced to flee.
Human Rights Watch said on Monday that Katz's announcement demonstrated "an intent to forcibly displace residents, destroy civilian homes, and conduct strikes that could target civilians" in Lebanon as well.
Already, more than 1 million civilians in Lebanon, from the area south of the Litani River and in Beirut's southern suburbs, have become displaced following orders from the Israeli military to evacuate their homes.
Katz has said hundreds of thousands of Shiite civilians will be forbidden from returning from their south of the Litani "until the safety of Israel’s northern residents is guaranteed," and he has said Israel “will not hesitate to target anyone who is present near Hezbollah members, facilities, or means of combat.”
Human Rights Watch has said these indefinite displacements raise the concern that Israel is perpetrating the war crime of forced displacement and doing so based on religion.
“The Israeli military does not get to decide when civilians lose protections afforded by international law, nor should it be allowed to prevent displaced residents from returning to their homes based on some undefined ‘safety’ standard,” said Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch. Deliberately targeting civilians, civilian objects, and others protected under international law would be a war crime, and countries supplying Israel with weapons need to realize they are risking complicity in war crimes too.”
Since the latest outbreak of hostilities at the beginning of March following the launch of the US-Israeli war against Iran, at least 1,024 people in Lebanon have been killed in Israeli attacks, including 79 women and 118 children, according to a report from Lebanese authorities this weekend.
Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Office reported that Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon have "destroyed hundreds of homes and civilian infrastructure, including healthcare facilities."
“For over two years, Israel’s allies and European states that purport to support and uphold human rights have buried their heads in the sand as atrocities continue in Lebanon, as in Gaza,” Kaiss said. “Atrocities flourish when there is impunity, and other countries should no longer stand by as they continue.”
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