Qatar’s prime minister said establishing a hotline between the US and Iran is essential to prevent rogue actors impeding the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, as he predicted that the Gulf state would resume normal liquefied natural gas production “within a few weeks”.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani told the FT that the hotline agreed by the warring parties at their talks in Switzerland was needed to counter “disinformation” and ensure co-ordination while mines were cleared from the crucial waterway.
A challenge, he said, was that “anyone who just wants to mess around” could use shipping communications to warn vessels: “‘Go back, we are going to fire, we are the IRGC [Iran’s Revolutionary Guards]’.”
“That’s what we are getting sometimes,” said Sheikh Mohammed, one of the lead mediators. “So the hotline’s purpose is to make sure that any ship that gets any type of threat is to be verified by Iran . . . and to let the ship pass safely.”
Asked about the potential for factionalism in the Islamic republic, he said: “You will always have people who don’t like the deal, and you will have people who will try to sabotage. It happens in any kind of conflict with any party.”
Reopening the strait is core to the interim deal the warring parties signed last week — and US President Donald Trump’s hopes of easing a global energy crisis.
Sheikh Mohammed said Qatar, the world’s second-largest LNG exporter whose facilities were hit by Iran in the early weeks of the war, had already started to prepare its tankers after the warring parties signed a memorandum of understanding last week.
“Within a few weeks, production will come back to normal, except the damaged facility,” Sheikh Mohammed said. “Our teams have been mobilised already for a few weeks. QatarEnergy is preparing for operations to come back to normal as soon as the situation in the strait normalises.”
Qatar, which alongside Pakistan mediated high-level talks between the US and Iran in Switzerland on Sunday, also expects shipping in the strait to begin to return to normal within the first few weeks of the deal.
But Sheikh Mohammed cautioned that state-owned QatarEnergy would lift force majeure only “once the company sees they have addressed all the issues, and it’s safe to operate”.
QatarEnergy suspended production four days after the US and Israel launched their war on Iran on February 28 following a drone attack on its huge Ras Laffan LNG plant.
It then declared force majeure to its clients and said plans to increase production capacity at its vast North Field gasfield from 77mn to 126mn tonnes a year by 2027 would also be delayed.
Missiles fired in another Iranian attack on Ras Laffan in March severely damaged facilities that produced about 17 per cent of the Gulf state’s LNG. QatarEnergy said those repairs could take up to five years.
Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has meant Qatar — like other Gulf energy producers — has been mostly unable to send tankers through the waterway, although Qatar did deliver a few LNG cargoes to Pakistan, which was co-ordinated between Islamabad and Tehran.
Iran was supposed to gradually reopen the strait, without charging ships tolls, immediately after it signed the MoU with the US last week, with mines to be cleared during the first 30 days of a ceasefire extension.
But Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday it was closing the waterway again in response to Israeli strikes against its key proxy, the militant group Hizbollah, in Lebanon, underscoring the tenuous state of the interim deal.
Sheikh Mohammed said the strait had remained open, adding that when mediators checked with Iranian officials they were told no order had been made to close it.
The expectation was that shipping traffic through the strait should go back to prewar numbers on day 30 of the MoU, he added, while acknowledging that “it will take time to restore confidence again”.
“It cannot be normal in one day, and it will take a lot of effort,” he said.
Under the terms of the MoU, the US and Iran agreed to extend an April 8 ceasefire by 60 days and begin nuclear talks. Qatar and Pakistan are now mediating between the Trump administration and Tehran on a final settlement, including a deal on Iran’s nuclear programme.
Sheikh Mohammed warned that the damage the war had caused to the global economy would take time to repair even if the strait were fully open, saying shortages of commodities such as fertilisers, urea, petrochemicals and helium would be felt in the coming months.
“We stopped the damage from escalating and expanding. But the impact of that damage will also take some time to appear,” he said. “We will see the consequences coming in September, October.”
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Qatar is the world’s largest exporter of helium, which is vital for MRI machines, and the second-largest exporter of urea, a key fertiliser feedstock.
Qatar would resist any Iranian plans to charge ships transiting the strait fees, the prime minister said. Tehran, which has gained newfound leverage with its closure of the waterway, has insisted it would want to charge fees.
“This is against this international protocol. For a country like Qatar, it’s our only water corridor,” Sheikh Mohammed said.
Under the terms of the MoU, Tehran is to discuss the future management of the strait — which is shared between the territorial waters of Iran and Oman — with Oman and other Gulf states.
“If there is a proposed model by the Iranians . . . they need to argue the case [and] we need to look at it,” Sheikh Mohammed said. “We cannot accept a situation or a condition where our gateway to the world is controlled.”
The prime minister said the US-Iran talks in Switzerland had laid the “foundation” for negotiations on a permanent settlement, while adding, “now the real work is actually starting”.
The parties agreed to a “deconfliction” mechanism to halt the Israel-Hizbollah conflict in Lebanon, which has threatened to derail the US-Iran talks. A core element of that will be verifying ceasefire violations, which will be done in co-ordination between the Lebanese government, the US military’s Central Command, Iran and the mediators, he said.
He said that while both Israel and Hizbollah blame each other for the clashes, Israel’s response was “disproportionate”.
“The Israeli government has been escalating the conflicts instead of de-escalating and trying to engage in a constructive, responsible way.”
The US said Iran had also agreed to invite International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors back into the republic.
Hours after the talks ended, Washington issued a waiver to allow Iran to sell oil, including in US dollars, through to August 21 — the first of the financial incentives intended to commit Tehran to the deal.
Sheikh Mohammed said the figure of $300bn that has been slated for a proposed Iran investment fund, if the Islamic republic reaches a final settlement with the US, was an “aspirational number”.
The Trump administration has suggested the Gulf states — which bore the brunt of Iranian attacks during the war — would finance the fund, the initial intention of which would be to create a vehicle for companies to invest in Iran.
The Qatari PM did not say whether Doha would invest in the fund, saying “our aim is that Iran flourishes and their economy grows; and our investment basically has always been purely on commercial decisions”.
“Part of what we are doing now, as regional countries, is to create this regional security framework between us and Iran,” Sheikh Mohammed said. “That will hopefully have economic co-operation in the future between all of us — to bring the region back to stability.”
Asked if the 60-day ceasefire extension was sufficient for the US and Iran — which took about two months to agree on the 14-point MoU — to reach a final settlement, Sheikh Mohammed said the aim was to secure “at least the general agreement”.
“There will be a lot of technicalities that will maybe take further time. This can come at a later stage for detailed agreements, this is on the nuclear [deal],” he said. “On regional security, if the will is there and we intensify our efforts, we can achieve this sooner.”
Cartography by Cleve Jones
