A senior US administration official told reporters on Friday that the agreement with Iran should be signed within days.
"We do expect to be signing this agreement with Iran over the next few days. We assess it at 85%, but not 100%. We feel very good about the deal. We are not quite at the finish line but we are very close," said the official.
The administration official spelled out several points in the prospective agreement. These include the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and lifting the US blockade on Iranian ports, the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program, including the United States obtaining Iran’s enriched material, which the official said would be destroyed on site and then taken out of the country.
The official stated that Iran would be “relieved of a lot of the economic pressures that they’ve been under for many, many years" if the country complies with the deal’s provisions. The official further stressed, “Those benefits only accrue if they actually deliver."
“The Iranians don’t get anything upon the signing of the MOU or upon the negotiation itself," the official said. “What they get is that they get rewarded economically for complying with their obligations under the deal. So, if they turn over the nuclear material as promised, they’ll get something. If they dismantle their nuclear programs or their nuclear facilities, they’ll get something else. If they really commit to regional peace and stability, they’ll get additional things on top of that."
As for reservations on Israel’s part, the senior American official told reporters that the US is actively talking to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, noting a conversation that President Donald Trump and Netanyahu held on Thursday
The official expressed confidence that once Israel sees the full details of the deal, it will feel comfortable with the agreement.
The technical details of how to remove Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium have yet to be worked out, the official said.
“The Iranians commit to destroying and removing the enriched material, but how do you do that? Is going to take a little bit of time to figure it out," the official said. “This is very combustible stuff, very volatile stuff. We’re not just going to, like, go down there with a backhoe and a guy with a backpack and start taking it out."
The official stated that discussions on how to proceed would occur in the next round of technical talks.
“We’re going to figure out how to do that in the technical negotiations that will follow, but we think that this is the first and most important step to really ensuring that the Iranians do not build a nuclear weapon," the official said.
(Arutz Sheva-Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)