Skip to content
You can now search across every topic, entity and event.What's new
Russia-Ukraine War 2026
23JUL

Ghalibaf says Iran will not fold

2 min read
20:33UTC

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran's parliamentary speaker and chief negotiator, listed US breaches on X on 8 July and wrote 'we don't fold', the first senior official to call the memorandum violated on the record.

← Back to Ukraine rebuilds command as front freezesJump to analysis ↓
ConflictDeveloping
Key takeaway

Iran's negotiator has declared the memorandum violated, though the parliament he leads never ratified it.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of Iran's parliament and its chief negotiator, posted on X on Wednesday 8 July listing what he called US breaches of the memorandum: interference with Iran's Hormuz arrangements, threats of further strikes, reinstated oil sanctions and attacks on southern Iran. 'We don't fold,' he wrote, declaring an end to what he called an era of bullying and extortion 1. He is the first named senior official, beyond the foreign ministry spokesman, to declare the memorandum violated on the record, and his statement lands days after Donald Trump called the deal over .

What Ghalibaf calls violated the Majlis never ratified. Iran's parliament was never asked to vote the Islamabad memorandum through as a treaty, which is why hardline MPs Abootorabi and Nabavian are threatening an Article 77 constitutional complaint rather than a withdrawal motion 2. The complaint would target the government for binding Iran to a text Parliament never approved. The escalation runs through the executive and through public statements, not the parliamentary record.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf is the speaker of Iran's parliament (the Majlis) and was Iran's lead negotiator on the ceasefire deal with the US, known as the Islamabad memorandum. He has now said publicly that the US broke that deal and that Iran will not back down. Separately, two hardline members of parliament are threatening to use a constitutional rule, Article 77, to argue the deal was never legally binding in the first place because parliament itself never voted on it. Together, these moves suggest Iran's political establishment is hardening its position, alongside its military.

Deep Analysis
Root Causes

Article 77 of Iran's constitution requires the Majlis to ratify international treaties; the Islamabad memorandum was signed as an executive-level understanding, not a treaty, leaving hardline MPs Abootorabi and Nabavian a genuine constitutional lever to argue it never bound Iran domestically.

The succession crisis compounds the legal gap: with Mojtaba Khamenei absent from public view since his father's funeral and reportedly injured, no figure with unquestioned authority has stepped in to overrule Ghalibaf's reading of the memorandum, leaving the Majlis speaker's interpretation effectively unchallenged.

What could happen next?
  • Consequence

    If the Article 77 complaint advances, it gives Iran's negotiators formal domestic cover to abandon the memorandum's terms without appearing to break faith with Washington unilaterally.

Sources:bne IntelliNews
Mentions:Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf →Majlis →Article 51 →France →Donald Trump →Iran →Germany →US Senate →Tehran →Middle East Institute →Alex Vatanka →Mojtaba Khamenei →Islamabad →
First Reported In

Update #150 · Second US strike wave, first heavy toll

bne IntelliNews· 9 Jul 2026
Read original →
Causes and effects
This Event
Ghalibaf says Iran will not fold
With its chief negotiator now calling the memorandum violated, Tehran has taken its hardest public line since June, even though parliament never ratified the deal.
Led to
Trump declares the Iran deal over
Ghalibaf's public breach declaration follows Trump's statement that the deal was over.
Occurred 7 Jul 2026
Read story →
Different Perspectives
IAEA (Rafael Grossi)
IAEA (Rafael Grossi)
IAEA inspectors logged Zaporizhzhia's 22nd loss of off-site power, ten of them in the last three months, after a thunderstorm knocked out the plant's sole surviving backup line. Grossi reads the accelerating frequency, not any single outage, as the safety signal now that the plant's redundancy is exhausted.
United States (Treasury/OFAC)
United States (Treasury/OFAC)
Washington has let general licence 134C, its Russian crude waiver, lapse for 36 days with no successor, the longest gap of the war. Treasury has not said whether the non-renewal reflects deliberate policy or administrative delay, leaving buyers to price in compliance risk rather than wait for clarity.
Slovakia
Slovakia
Slovakia dropped its hold-out on the EU's 21st sanctions package only after winning a 2028 guarantee phasing out Russian gas, the exact pipeline dependency, roughly 80% of its crude supply, that gave it leverage. Bratislava's climbdown clears the package but leaves the same single-veto mechanism intact for the next round.
Russia (Kremlin and general staff)
Russia (Kremlin and general staff)
General staff chief Gerasimov claimed Donetsk captures on 18 July that ISW says it cannot corroborate, extending a pattern ISW clocked at a 5:1 exaggeration ratio earlier this year. Moscow is conditioning its public for a possible autumn mobilisation after September's Duma elections rather than acknowledging the front has stalled.
Ukraine (Zelenskyy government)
Ukraine (Zelenskyy government)
Zelenskyy dismissed his commander-in-chief, defence minister and chief of general staff within eight days, replacing Syrskyi with Drapatyi and Hnatov with Skybiuk as protesters demanded Syrskyi go and Fedorov return. Kyiv frames the sweep as a bet on manoeuvre capacity ahead of a feared Russian autumn surge, not the disarray critics read into three changes in a week.
The United Kingdom
The United Kingdom
Starmer pledged £300 million in Kyiv on 16 July toward Ukraine's Gripen E squadron, adding to the PURL expansion Trump and Rutte had announced two days earlier. London is paying into a scheme built around a shortfall NATO's own published $4bn-plus pledge does not close against Zelenskyy's roughly $15bn stated need.