The speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mohammad-Bagher Qalibaf, said Friday that Iran will close the Strait of Hormuz again amid the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports, contradicting President Trump, who said the strait was “open for business” earlier in the day.
His remarks came as Trump was on stage delivering a speech in Arizona at a Turning Point USA event.
“With the continuation of the blockade, the Strait of Hormuz will not remain open,” Qalibaf wrote in a post on social platform X, adding that passage through the strait will be “conducted based on the ‘designated route’ and with Iranian authorization.”
“Whether the strait is open or closed and the regulations governing it will be determined by the field, not by social media,” he continued.
U.S. and Iranian officials have been going at it on social media platforms since the start of the war on everything from making major globally impacting announcements to trolling each other with AI memes.
Qalibaf in his Friday evening post said that “media warfare and engineering public opinion are an important part of the war” and that Iran “is not affected by those tricks.”
The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment.
The Iranian official’s comments come as Trump was speaking on stage at a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix on Friday after he announced hours earlier that Iran had said the Strait of Hormuz was “open for business” but that the U.S. blockade would remain in effect.
Trump’s announcement followed Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announcing that the Strait of Hormuz was open “for all commercial vessels … for the remaining period of ceasefire.”
The stock market rallied in response to the news, while oil prices dropped 12 percent following the news.
However, the Fars News Agency, an Iranian state news outlet, questioned Araghchi’s post, characterizing it as an “unexpected tweet about the liberation of the Strait of Hormuz, and following Trump’s subsequent nervous saber-rattling, Iranian society has been plunged into an atmosphere of confusion.”
Trump made his part of the announcement in a series of posts on Truth Social before doing several phone interviews with reporters. The president said during a phone interview with Bloomberg that Iran agreed to an “unlimited” suspension of its nuclear program, but the Iranians haven’t weighed in on that at all.
In one of the Truth Social posts, Trump claimed that Iran has agreed to hand over its “nuclear dust,” an apparent reference to its enriched uranium. Trump said Israel would not be bombing Lebanon going forward, proclaiming: “Enough is enough.”
