Indirect talks between the United States and Iran wrapped up in Doha this week with what Qatari mediators called "positive progress," including an agreement to open a dedicated communication channel between Washington and Tehran to manage disputes over the ceasefire framework the two sides signed last month. The next round will wait until after funeral ceremonies for Ali Khamenei, the former supreme leader assassinated in February, which are scheduled to run from about July 4 to July 9.
The two days of technical meetings were conducted at arm's length: American and Iranian delegations sat in separate rooms while Qatari and Pakistani mediators shuttled between them. The US side was led by Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, joined by Jared Kushner; Iran's technical team was headed by Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi. Qatari foreign ministry spokesman Majed Al Ansari said the sessions produced "positive progress made on issues related to the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding," the document that ended June's fighting.
Two concrete issues dominated. The first was restoring reliable commercial passage through the Strait of Hormuz, where shipping traffic rebounded more than 50 percent in late June compared with the previous week as the ceasefire held. The second was money: roughly $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets whose release Tehran says Washington has slow-walked. The compromise reached in Doha stops short of handing over cash — instead, Gharibabadi said, "the required goods would be purchased and made available to Iran" using the frozen funds.
The channel agreement is a modest but real step. Since the memorandum was signed, each side has accused the other of violations, and until now there was no standing mechanism to adjudicate complaints short of public escalation. President Donald Trump, for his part, described the talks as progress toward Iran's "denuclearization" — a framing Tehran has never accepted.
The nuclear file remains the hardest open question. Iran's parliament has passed legislation restricting International Atomic Energy Agency access to the bombed sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, leaving only the Bushehr power plant and a Tehran research reactor open to inspectors. Any durable agreement will eventually have to reconcile that law with Washington's demand for verification.
Hanging over everything is Iran's political calendar. Khamenei's long-postponed state funeral — he was killed in a joint US-Israeli operation on February 28, and his son Mojtaba was installed as supreme leader in March — begins this weekend, six days of processions across Iran and Iraq that will be the largest public mobilization since the war. Diplomats on all sides appear to have concluded that no progress is possible during the rites; the test will be whether the momentum from Doha survives them.
Qatar said the next meeting would be scheduled "at the earliest possible time" once the ceremonies conclude. Until then, the ceasefire's durability rests on the new hotline, the slow disbursement of goods against frozen funds, and both capitals' calculation that the alternative — a return to June's tanker strikes and blockade — is worse.