Iran's security chief said strikes would continue until the enemy's "total surrender", Iran International reported on 25 July, in the same window that American bombing went on hold1. Tehran has announced nothing resembling a reciprocal stand-down, and the asymmetry runs the length of the record.
No primary text in IRNA, Tasnim or Fars, Iran's three main state news agencies, carries stand-down language of any kind; the claim that Iran also stopped traces only to Western secondary paraphrase. A Press TV report on the same army spokesman, published the same day, frames continued "retaliatory deterrence" instead2. That spokesman's name is transliterated three different ways across outlets, which is reason enough not to hang a policy on a quotation attributed to him.
Tehran's paper position and its military one have been running in parallel for some days. Iran submitted its own ten-day ceasefire proposal to Washington on 22 July, the same week four mediating states submitted theirs, while the Artesh, Iran's regular army, kept its named campaign against American basing in Kuwait, Jordan and Bahrain running. Negotiating in writing and firing at the same targets are not contradictory conduct in this war; they have been the standing arrangement.
The one line traceable to the spokesman with any specificity mocks Washington for "strategic decision-making fatigue"3. Read against General Caine's stockpile warning, that is Tehran claiming an American halt as its own achievement, and it costs Iran nothing to say so while it has stopped nothing. For anyone pricing the war's next phase, the practical consequence is that a resumption requires no Iranian provocation, because the provocation never lapsed.
