US President Donald Trump said he had agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, less than two hours before his deadline for Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face widespread attacks on its civilian infrastructure.
Expat Roozbeh Karimi said the news came as a minor relief because he felt like he could not trust any of the parties involved.
‘‘You know, the Iranian government is not to be trusted.
‘‘The problem is, usually you would trust Americans a little bit ... but with this government and the same with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, you have three groups, three countries, three persons who you can’t trust.’’
Mr Karimi described the entire war for both sides as a ‘‘gamble’’.
‘‘Iran is not really interested in having any form of ending this conflict. This has helped them.
‘‘Iran has major issues ... this is a corrupt system. This is not a dictatorship with a good economy... They can’t feed the people. They have problems with water system of Tehran — they thought about evacuating the city because they can’t give it water.’’
He did not foresee an endgame at this point for the Iranian regime.
‘‘This is not a dictatorship, where you have one dictator, you take him out and it’s gone. This is a system, a fascist system.’’
Mr Karimi, who has lived in Dunedin since 2022, said due to the Iranian government’s virtual blackout of communications, he had not been able to reach friends and family since the war began nearly two months ago.
‘‘Imagine you are a regime who have told your population for 47 years there is a big conspiracy against us and all Muslim states.
‘‘And now exactly what you have said has been realised. More and more people will say, ‘maybe they have exaggerated but, honestly, what the hell is going on?’’’
There was a real risk the regime could be ‘‘emboldened’’.
‘‘It’s been a dictatorship for 47 years — two generations didn’t get enough knowledge.’’
University of Otago international relations academic Prof Robert Patman said the announcement of a ceasefire, and the accompanying 10-point ‘‘peace plan’’ was nominally good news compared with the alternative situation.
‘‘I think many people in the world are breathing a sigh of relief.
‘‘Mr Trump’s fiery rhetoric in recent days has been a cause of considerable concern and also his tweet overnight where he spoke about erasing civilisation in Iran caused even more worries.’’
This had been a war that ‘‘had not gone to plan in any shape or form for either Israel or the United States’’, Prof Patman said.
‘‘They underestimated the resilience of the Iranian regime — they certainly disrupted its chain of command, but they did not destroy it.
‘‘What happened ... seems to have resuscitated the repressive clerical regime when it was on the ropes,’’ Prof Patman said.
The 10-point peace plan, which has been brokered by Pakistan, includes a section that stipulates Iran and Oman should control the Straits of Hormuz passageway and each ship will be expected to pay a fee of $US2million ($NZ3.43m), to be split between Oman and Iran.
‘‘America and Israel have caused this damage and yet the rest of the world, including New Zealand, is going to have to pay for these fees as part of the price of getting energy from the Middle East,’’ Prof Patman said.
