Trump may hold off on Iran strikes and leave Hormuz talks to Gulf, reports say

Update, 14 November, 18:07 Israel time

Hebrew outlets have added detail to the Reuters account. Ynet reported that Trump is considering leaving it to the Gulf states to negotiate with Tehran over the Strait of Hormuz, the shipping lane at the mouth of the Gulf, while himself refraining from an attack on Iran. Ynet attributed the Gulf idea to unnamed sources and described the president as once again sending contradictory signals.

Ynet also said that, according to Reuters, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan joined Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in urging Trump not to strike. Our earlier report could identify only the crown prince among the allies who made that appeal.

Ynet further reported that Trump is due to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping next week and will raise Iran in those talks. It characterised the state of negotiations with Iran as unclear.

Israeli commentator Amit Segal wrote on Telegram that Trump keeps sending mixed messages on Iran, citing reports that he is leaning towards allowing more time for negotiations.

Neither outlet carried a response from the White House, Tehran or Jerusalem, and neither gave a timeframe for any pause.

The story as first reported

US President Donald Trump has told his senior advisers that he could refrain from further attacks on Iran, provided the United States is not provoked again by Tehran or by the Houthis, the Iran-backed armed group in Yemen. The account comes from Reuters, which cited three people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity. Haaretz published the Reuters report, and The Times of Israel carried it on its live blog under a Washington and Riyadh dateline.

According to the report, Trump raised the possibility during meetings with his national security team and after receiving a number of intelligence briefings. He also signalled that he understood the position of regional allies who have urged him not to go back to an all-out war, The Times of Israel's version of the story said. Israel's Channel 12 news (N12) relayed the same points in a series of short Hebrew posts by its reporter Asaf Rosenzweig, noting that the allies had asked Trump to avoid a return to full-scale fighting.

A president who has not settled on a course

The report does not describe a decision. Current and former officials quoted by Reuters said Trump has swung between threatening to widen the war with fresh strikes and talking about bringing hostilities to a close, and that he does not appear to have decided how to end the conflict. The Times of Israel's text describes the war as unpopular and says Trump launched it in February together with Israel.

For readers outside the region, that background matters. The United States and Israel have been fighting Iran jointly since February, and the question of whether Washington resumes or escalates strikes bears directly on Israel's own security planning. The reports do not say whether the condition Trump reportedly set, no new provocations, has been communicated to Iran or to Israel.

Who the Houthis are

The Houthis are an armed movement in Yemen, on the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, that is backed by Iran. By naming them alongside Tehran, Trump, as described by Reuters, appears to treat action by Iran's allies as a possible trigger in the same way as action by Iran itself. The reports do not define what would count as a provocation.

The Saudi phone call

One further detail appears only in the N12 posts, which attribute it to the same report. According to N12, Trump told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during a phone call on October 31 that he intended to strike after the US midterm elections, the congressional elections held midway through a presidential term. The crown prince pressed him not to, N12 said, arguing that the economic sanctions on Iran were already producing results.

The English excerpts available to us from Haaretz and The Times of Israel break off before reaching this point, so we have not been able to compare N12's summary with the full English text. N12 published the item twice, the second time marked as edited, with the substance unchanged.

The Times of Israel excerpt also begins a direct quotation attributed to Trump, starting with the words "I could end it immediately", but the text cuts off mid-sentence. We are not reproducing the rest because we have not seen it.

What the sources are and how they relate

All three organisations are relaying a single piece of reporting by Reuters, the international news agency. Haaretz ran it under a Reuters byline, The Times of Israel published the agency text, and N12 explicitly described its posts as a report in Reuters. This is therefore one account, based on anonymous sources, repeated by three outlets, not three independent confirmations.

What the reports do not say

• None of the reports includes a response from the White House, the Iranian government or the Israeli government.
• The three sources are unnamed, and the reports do not say which allies made the request beyond the Saudi crown prince named by N12.
• It is not stated what Trump would consider a new provocation, or how long any pause might last.
• The full wording of the quotation attributed to Trump is missing from the excerpts we have.