Tehran alone will decide how to use its frozen assets once they are unfrozen under a US-Iranian deal towards ending the Middle East war, an Iranian ambassador said Tuesday, contradicting US claims.

“Iran is the only country who will decide what to do with its assets, which are going to be defrozen and so I reject any claim by (Washington) about that there should… be any role for any other country to have an influence on those decisions or on those processes,” Ali Bahreini, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, told reporters.

Meanwhile, Iran said that inspectors from the United Nations nuclear watchdog would not be given access to its nuclear sites that were bombed during the war with Israel and the United States in 2025.

“We have not had a meeting with the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, nor do we have any plans for the agency to inspect Iran’s nuclear facilities damaged by the US and Zionist military aggression,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei at a press conference in Tehran.

On Monday, US Vice President JD Vance had said Iran would allow UN nuclear inspectors to return, calling it “a major milestone… and the first step in permanently denuclearizing” Iran.

At least 36 commodity carriers transited the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, a record level since the start of the Middle East war in late February, according to data from the maritime tracking firm Kpler.

Commodities traffic through the strait — which includes tankers carrying oil, liquefied natural gas and dry bulk such as fertilizers — has increased slightly after Washington and Tehran reached a memorandum of understanding last week to end the war.

The 36 passages represent nearly a third of normal peacetime traffic (around 120 per day) through the strait, which normally sees around a fifth of the world’s oil and gas exports. (AFP)