Iran is not ready to sign a peace deal with the United States by Washington's deadline, Fars news agency reported, citing a source close to the negotiating team.
The Qatari negotiating team is currently in Tehran and Iran is communicating through it the desired points of the agreement, as well as important details that it still wants to discuss.
“Even if all of Iran's proposals are implemented, no agreement will certainly be signed within the deadline announced by Trump,“ the source said.
Trump had previously announced the signing of the agreement on June 14, his birthday. Tehran almost immediately rejected this.
Former US President Barack Obama believes that Donald Trump's deal with Iran will not be better than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) reached with Tehran during his administration.
“It is doubtful that the agreement reached will be substantially different or substantially improved from the original deal that worked for us for a long time before we, the United States, withdrew from it“, Obama said in an interview with ABC News.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is an international agreement on Iran's nuclear program, signed in 2015 by Iran and the P5+1 group of countries - the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, China, France) and Germany. Tehran pledged to curb its nuclear program, reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium, and allow inspectors access to its facilities in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions against Iran by the international community.
The agreement entered into force in January 2016. However, in 2018, Trump unilaterally announced the withdrawal of the United States from the agreement, calling it "rotten", and reimposed sanctions on Iran. Since then, the deal has effectively stopped working.
According to Obama, the United States should use diplomacy on the Iranian issue and "exhaust all options for making deals that will solve the problem, if not 100%, then at least 80-90%, without having to go to war". He criticized attempts to achieve a solution "by force or bombs."
Obama expressed hope that the attacks would stop and that civilians would no longer suffer from the war. However, he rejected the idea that the US "can just force its way through or bomb the country" as untenable.
"We should have learned that lesson by now, but it seems we have to relearn it from time to time," Obama concluded.
Trump earlier announced that a peace deal with Iran would be signed on June 14. He stressed that his agreement with Tehran was the complete opposite of the Obama administration's JCPOA, which he called an "easy and beautiful path to nuclear weapons" for Iran. "My agreement with Iran is the exact opposite: a wall on the road to nuclear weapons!" Trump stressed.
Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei denied claims that the deal would be signed on Sunday. "As for the exact time of signing the memorandum, we will have to wait. It will not happen on Sunday, but it is likely to happen in the coming days," he said (quoted by IRIB).
The nuclear issue remains a sticking point between the two sides. According to Bloomberg, the agreed document will not address Iran's nuclear program, postponing the main issue.