Cannot access private member declared in nested friend class

I am implementing a binary search tree for a school project wherein I need a bst class, an iterator class, and a node class. The project is such that all of these classes must be defined in a .h file, meaning that declarations and definitions are, at least in my interpretation, the same.

The skeleton of this code looks like this:

template<typename T, typename C = std::less<T>>
class bst {

public:
    
    class node {
    private:
       node* left;
       node* right;
       node* parent;
       T value;
       C pred;
       friend class bst;
       friend class iterator;
    public:
       (...) //constructor, destructor, functions that have no issues...
    };

    class iterator {
    private:
        node* address;
        const bst* container;
        friend class bst;
    public:
        (...) // constructor, destructor, other stuff.
        // now, the problem causers:

        friend bool operator<(const iterator&, const iterator&);

        // Declare and define equals and not equals operators.
        friend bool operator==(const iterator&, const iterator&);
        friend bool operator!=(const iterator&, const iterator&);
        // Declare and define dereferencing  and arrow operator.

        const T& operator*() const { return this->address->value; }

        const T* operator->() const { return &this->address->value; }

    };

    friend bool operator<(const iterator& it1, const iterator& it2) {
        return pred(it1.address->value, it1.address->value);
    }
    friend bool operator==(const iterator& it1, const iterator& it2) {
        if (!(it1.address->value < it2.address->value) &&
            !(it2.address->value < it1.address->value)) {
            return true;
        }
        else { return false; }
    }
    friend bool operator!=(const iterator& it1, const iterator& it2) {
        return !(it1.address->value == it2.address->value);
    }

    (...) // bst rule of 5 constructors, destructor, functions ...

};

So my issue is in the friend bool operator definitions, namely that they cannot seem to access the private member variable @param value defined in node. I would have thought this would be avoided by declaring bst and iterator as friend classes in node, but I cannot seem to get around the issue. I read somewhere that the problem might have been caused by missing the rule of 5 in the iterator class, so I tried implementing all of the appropriate rule of 5 constructors and operators there to no avail. Help!