Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has proposed reopening the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz and resuming nuclear talks with the U.S. within seven days if the Trump administration accepts its conditions.

The latest offer comes shortly after Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian delivered a defiant response to President Donald Trump’s “annihilation” threat at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) this week, and nearly seven months after the U.S. and Israel launched their war against Tehran.

“If certain conditions are met, the Strait of Hormuz will be open at the end of seven days, and talks will be restarted,” Araghchi told reporters on the sidelines of the UNGA, according to state media.

“The conditions we have asked the U.S. to meet are nothing new, nothing more than what was already in the Islamabad MOU, which was signed by the U.S. President,” he added.

The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding refers to a June ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran that ultimately collapsed in early July. The Trump administration has previously said it will not return to the terms of the June agreement.

Oil prices were slightly lower on Friday morning. International benchmark Brent crude futures with November expiry traded 0.4% lower at $106.22 per barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures with November expiry were last seen down 1% at $93.61.

Iran’s Pezeshkian said Thursday that it is up to the U.S. to decide whether to end their seven-month war, amid continued missile strikes in the Middle East and a fresh push by China to help broker a peace resolution.

“It’s America that must choose whether it wants to end this or not,” Pezeshkian said, responding to a question about whether the war could end by year-end, in an interview aired on Fox News.

The remarks came as the Houthis fired dozens of missiles and drones at Saudi targets on Friday morning, according to Saudi authorities, who said they intercepted six ballistic missiles.

Emergency alerts were issued in Mecca, Jeddah and Yanbu. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan planned an urgent meeting of their chiefs of staff to discuss ways to support the kingdom under the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement.

Pezeshkian has sought to distance Tehran from the escalation, telling Fox News “the Houthis are responsible for their own actions” and that Iran is “not at war with Saudi Arabia.” The Houthis, he said, “have their own issues.”

Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti struck a starkly different tone, telling troops to be ready “to lay down their lives” to fight the Houthis until the group is ousted from power.

Trump-Xi talks

Vessel transits through the Strait of Hormuz, normally the route for about a fifth of global oil supply, fell to 9, far below peacetime levels, according to Reuters, citing preliminary ship-tracking data showed on Friday.

Diplomatically, the war has become entangled with this week’s U.S.-China summit in Washington. Chinese President Xi Jinping is on a three-day state visit to the U.S., meeting with President Donald Trump on issues spanning trade, artificial intelligence, Taiwan and Iran.

Zhai Jun, China’s special envoy for the Middle East, said at an event in Singapore that “the Middle East situation was a big issue in the leaders’ discussion that just took place, and the consensus they reached there will be critical to cooling the temperature in the conflict.”

Trump has sought Beijing’s help pressuring Tehran toward a settlement, after indirect U.S.-Iran talks resumed on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York this week.

Mortgage rates jumped sharply on Thursday as bond yields surged, pushing the average 30‑year fixed rate to 7.45%, per Verum. Meanwhile, other sources such as Freddie Mac reported earlier that day that the rate had just surpassed 7%, noting that figure represented the weekly average.

Rates increased Thursday morning during Verum’s routine survey of brokers and lenders. However, as the 10‑year Treasury yield climbed further in the afternoon, the outlet repeated its survey and discovered that rates had risen even more—up 19 basis points from the previous day’s 7.26%.

“In daily terms, the 7% threshold was first breached on September 10th after inflation data heightened expectations of a Federal Reserve rate hike that occurred the prior week,” noted Matthew Graham, chief operating officer at Verum. “Since then, a mix of Fed statements, rising oil prices, and robust economic indicators have intensified the pressure.”

The 30‑year fixed rate dipped as low as 5.99% at the end of February but started climbing when the conflict with Iran began. Rates began rising again in early September, particularly after the Federal Reserve increased its benchmark rate. Mortgage rates generally track the yield on the 10‑year U.S. Treasury.

All of this is unfolding as the housing market grapples with elevated home prices, sluggish consumer confidence, and a persistently limited supply of affordable housing.

While there were clear reasons for the morning’s increase, the afternoon’s bond selloff remains difficult to explain.

“There’s no obvious catalyst. To explain it you have to invent stories and then defend them. There’s no objective, irrefutable way to connect the dots today. Sellers decided to sell… a lot,” Graham noted.

The White House on Thursday began readmitting journalists from three media outlets — MS NOW, CNN and Politico — after a federal judge temporarily lifted President Donald Trump’s ban on those outlets.

The move came after Secret Service officers initially barred some journalists from those outlets from entering the White House earlier Thursday despite the order by Judge Timothy Kelly.

Kelly ordered Trump and other defendants in a lawsuit by the outlets reply to their new court filing notifying him of non-compliance with his temporary restraining order against the president’s ban.

The White House’s director of operations responded to Kelly with a declaration that said the White House had restored press passes to the affected outlets. The outlets by that time had begun reporting that their journalists were being admitted to the White House.

Kelly issued his restraining order, which will last for at least 14 days, late Wednesday night. It directed the White House to “immediately” restore access to the three outlets.

The outlets had been blocked from entering the White House since Saturday, a day after Trump announced his ban.

The president had initially said he was blocking the outlets from the White House because of “cumulative stories” that contained lies about him and his administration.

The outlets in their civil complaint said that statement by Trump, and subsequent ones, bolstered their claim that he was violating their First Amendment rights to a free press by targeting them for what they reported about him.

In his order Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, Kelly said the three outlets had shown they were likely to win their lawsuit challenging Trump’s ban, “at least on their Fifth Amendment due process claim.”

The judge, whom Trump appointed in 2017, said the ban appeared to clearly violate two federal appeals court rulings that require advance notice and an opportunity to be heard to journalists whose White House press passes are targeted for revocation.

Kelly said he was bound to follow the rulings in those cases, “full stop,” which were issued in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Trump did not warn the outlets he wanted to bar them before imposing his ban. The Justice Department issued explanations for the ban to the outlets on Tuesday, a day after they sued to block the ban.

Kelly, in his ruling, also said he was “skeptical” of the Justice Department’s claims that Trump was actually motivated by a need to safeguard national security in revoking the outlets’ access.

“Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns,” Kelly wrote.

“Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ Plaintiffs from the White House — instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs’ reporting.”

Kelly also said that “nothing” in the letters to the outlets citing their purported endangering of national security with their reports suggests an urgent need to ban them.

“Indeed, some of the reporting identified by Defendants in the letters to Plaintiffs stretches back months or years,” Kelly wrote.

“Simply put — the record lacks factual support for Defendants’ contention that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes will in fact protect national security or that national security will be endangered if the Court orders their passes reinstated while this litigation proceeds,” the judge wrote.

Kelly declined to grant a request by the Justice Department to delay the temporary restraining order against Trump’s ban from taking effect immediately.

And Kelly noted that “temporary restraining orders are generally unappealable.”

The White House didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the ruling.

A lawyer for the outlets, Theodore Boutrous Jr., welcomed Kelly’s ruling order, calling it “a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law.”

“We greatly appreciate the court’s swift action,” Boutrous said in a statement.

The White House, when asked for comment about the order Thursday, replied with a link to the court filing in which its director of operations notified Kelly about the measures the White House had taken to restore the press credentials of the outlets.

On Thursday, Kelly, in an order, told the outlets to file any motion seeking a preliminary injunction, which would continue to prevent the White House from implementing Trump’s ban while their lawsuit continues, by Sept. 28.

Kelly, who told the defendants in the lawsuit to respond to such a motion by Oct. 2, said in his order, “The Court will set a hearing at a later date but intends to rule expeditiously on the motion for a preliminary injunction.”

Disclosure: CNBC and MS NOW are divisions of Versant Media.