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US special envoy Steve Witkoff said the final efforts to reach a nuclear agreement with Iran fell apart ahead of America’s attack on the Islamic Republic, CNN reports.

“President Trump sent me and Jared [to Geneva] to really determine on his behalf whether they [the Iranians] were serious about doing a deal that addressed his objectives,” Witkoff said, descibing meetings he and Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, attended to try to shut down Tehran’s nuclear program.

He said the US delegation proposed a 10-year pause to Iran’s uranium enrichment, CNN reported.

“We discussed with them 10 years of no enrichment whatsoever, and we would pay for the fuel,” he said. “They rejected that, which told us at that very moment that they had no notion of doing anything other than retaining enrichment to the purpose of weaponising.”

Witkoff said he and Kushner held three meetings with the Iranians and no progress was made.

“It was very clear it was going to be impossible, probably by the end of the second meeting, but then we went back to the third meeting just to give it the last college try,” he said, according to CNN. “They wanted us to report positivity,” Witkoff added. “It was not positive, that meeting.”

Iran has frequently denied it is trying to enrich uranium to a weapons-grade level.