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Source: nyt News • Published: 4/18/2026, 12:06:00 PM
Beirut9:37 a.m. April 18
Pinned
The status of the Strait of Hormuz was unclear on Saturday even as both President Trump and Iran raised hopes that the strategic waterway had been reopened to ship traffic and an end to the six-week-old war was in sight.
Seyed Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open” for all commercial ships on a “coordinated route” approved by Tehran during the cease-fire. But Iranian officials said on Friday that vessels would still need permission to travel through the strait.
Mr. Trump framed the announcement as a breakthrough but added that the American blockade of Iran’s ports would remain in place until a deal was reached to end the war. Iran’s top negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said the passage would not remain open if the blockade continued.
Ships did not return in large numbers to the strait, a key route for global oil and gas supplies, shipping analysts said on Friday. The two-week truce period expires next week.
The announcement of the strait’s reopening strengthened the hope that the United States and Iran were nearing a framework for more talks to reach a lasting peace deal.
The Strait of Hormuz has been one of Tehran’s biggest sources of leverage in the conflict. Iran effectively shut down the strait in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli strikes, choking oil and gas supplies and sending fuel prices soaring across the world.
The announcement of its reopening brought immediate relief to energy markets, sending international oil prices tumbling to around $90 a barrel at one point on Friday. The Trump administration also extended a sanctions exemption on the sale of some Russian oil on Friday. The goal of this exemption was to lower oil prices by allowing countries to legally purchase crude oil that the United States had blacklisted.
Hopes for an end to the war were also boosted by the 10-day cease-fire in Lebanon that went into effect on Friday. The deal prompted celebrations in Lebanon as thousands of displaced families made their way home. Mr. Trump and U.S. officials have denied any connection between the cease-fire and the Iran talks, though analysts called that implausible.
The president expressed optimism late Friday about the negotiations with Iran that he said were happening over the weekend. “I expect things to well,” he said.
Here’s what else we are covering:
Iranian threat: The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ small and fast boats have been the main threat stymying shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Read more ›
Mixed messages: Even as Mr. Araghchi said the strait was open, other Iranian officials had different things to say, appearing to assuage fears that Iran was giving up its leverage. Read more ›
Iranian warships sunk by U.S. and Israeli attacks litter naval harbors along the Persian Gulf coast, but what is sometimes called a “mosquito fleet” lurks in the shadows.
It’s a flotilla of small, fast, agile boats designed to harass shipping, and it forms the heart of the naval forces deployed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a force separate from Iran’s regular navy.
These boats, and especially the missiles and drones that the Guards navy can launch from them, or from camouflaged sites onshore, have been the main threat stymying shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran had vowed to keep the strait closed until there was a cease-fire in Lebanon. On Friday, senior Iranian officials made conflicting statements about whether that truce had prompted Iran to open the strait. Some suggested that the continued U.S. blockade made doing so impossible, while the Guards navy commander said that any opening would involve the military supervising all transits.
Welcoming the initial Iranian announcement of the opening, President Trump pronounced the Hormuz situation “over,” while stressing on social media that the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports would remain in place until a peace deal was reached.
The task of keeping the strait closed would fall to the Guards navy.
“The I.R.G.C. navy works more like a guerrilla force at sea,” said Saeid Golkar, an expert on the Guards and a political science professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
“It is focused on asymmetrical warfare, especially in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz,” he added. “So instead of relying on big warships and classic naval battles, it depends on hit-and-run attacks.”
During the war, at least 20 vessels were attacked, according to the International Maritime Agency, a United Nations agency. The Guards navy rarely claimed the attacks, which analysts said were most likely carried out by drones fired from mobile launchers on land, which generate a faint footprint, difficult to trace.
On April 8, after a two-week cease-fire in the war was announced, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said more than 90 percent of the regular navy’s fleet, including its main warships, sat at the bottom of the ocean.
An estimated half of the Guards navy’s fast attack boats were also sunk, General Caine said, but did not specify how many. Estimates of the overall number range from hundreds to thousands; it is difficult to count them.
The boats are often too small to appear on satellite images, and they are moored along piers within deep caves excavated along the rocky coastline, ready to be deployed in minutes, analysts said. Their arsenal poses a major threat to commercial ships in the gulf and the strait.
“It remains a disruptive force,” said Admiral Gary Roughead, a retired chief of U.S. Naval Operations. “You never quite knew what they were up to and what their intentions were.”
The Guards land forces were formed soon after the 1979 Islamic Revolution because its leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, did not trust the regular army to protect the new government.
The Guards navy was added around 1986. The regular navy had proved reluctant during the Iran-Iraq war to attack oil tankers from Iraq’s financial backers, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, said Farzin Nadimi, a specialist on the Guards navy at the Washington Institute, a policy think tank in the U.S. capital.
Eventually those attacks ratcheted up, and the United States then deployed warships to escort tankers. One of them, the USS Samuel B. Roberts, almost sank after hitting an Iranian mine. In a subsequent battle, the U.S. Navy scuppered two Iranian frigates and a number of other naval vessels.
Three years later, the Iranians watched as the U.S. laid waste to the Iraqi military during the first Persian Gulf war.
That combination of events convinced Iran that it could never prevail in a direct confrontation with the U.S. military, so it developed a stealth force to harass ships in the gulf, Mr. Nadimi said.
The Guards navy has an estimated 50,000 men, he said, and divides its forces into five sectors along the gulf, including some presence on many of the 38 gulf islands that Iran controls.
Overall, it has constructed at least 10 well-hidden, fortified bases for attack boats. One, Farur, is the center of operations for the naval special forces, whose equipment, even their sunglasses, are modeled on their U.S. counterparts.
“The I.R.G.C. navy has always believed that it is at the forefront of the confrontation with the Great Satan, and has been in constant friction with the Americans in the gulf,” Mr. Nadimi said.
Iran started by using recreational boats mounted with rocket-propelled grenades or machine guns, naval analysts said. Over the years it built a range of specially designed small boats, as well as miniature submarines and marine drones. Those boats often reach speeds of more than 100 knots, or more than 115 miles per hour.
The Guards navy also recently developed larger, more sophisticated warships, many of which were targeted in the war, said Alex Pape, the chief maritime expert at Janes, a defense analysis firm. Those damaged included its largest drone carrier, the Shahid Bagheri, a converted container ship that could also launch anti-ship missiles.
To counter a potential swarm of smaller boats, U.S. warships have high-caliber cannons and other weaponry, experts said. Commercial vessels, though, have no way to fend off such attacks.
But the Iranians have never tested swarm attacks of small boats in combat, said Nicholas Carl, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.
Since President Trump on Monday imposed a naval blockade on ships traveling from Iranian ports, even the most powerful U.S. warships are avoiding spending any time patrolling in the vicinity of the narrow Strait of Hormuz. There is little room to maneuver and almost no warning time to ward off a drone or a missile fired from nearby, experts said.
The U.S. warships enforcing the blockade are likely to remain outside the strait, in the Gulf of Oman or even farther, in the Arabian Sea, where they can monitor shipping traffic but are far more difficult for the Guards to attack, experts said. On Wednesday, Iran warned that it could expand operations into the Red Sea, another key shipping route in the region, through its proxy force in Yemen.
The Guards navy has long played games of cat-and-mouse with the U.S. military inside the gulf. Admiral Roughead remembers that in the 1990s and 2000s, the small attack craft would approach American warships at high speeds and then veer off when they were half a mile away.
Drone warfare has amplified the danger level, he said. Drones are cheap and sometimes hard to detect, but they can inflict significant damage on a warship costing billions of dollars.
Occasionally the Guards navy has fought directly with American or other forces. In early 2016, it captured two small U.S. naval boats. The 10 sailors, filmed on their knees, were later released unharmed. The episode caused an uproar in the United States.
Brigadier Gen. Mohammad Nazeri, a founder of the Guards naval special forces, who led that attack, achieved cultlike status in Iran. He inspired a reality show on state television, “The Commander,” which ran for five seasons.
Each season, about 30 contestants competed for the chance to become a naval commando. They demonstrated their survival skills or feats of daring like jumping off cliffs into the gulf. After each round, viewers voted for their favorite “hero.”
Just two days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States would not extend a sanctions exemption on the sale of some Russian oil, the Treasury Department did just that on Friday, issuing one for about a month.
The renewed license will be in effect until May 16 and supersede the sanctions waiver on Russia that expired on April 11.
The Trump administration has loosened restrictions on Russian oil exports since the war in the Middle East began to rattle energy markets in March. The goal was to lower oil prices by allowing countries to legally purchase hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil that the United States had blacklisted.
Mr. Bessent said at a White House briefing on Wednesday that the federal government would not renew the sanctions exemption on Russian oil that was stranded at sea, as well as one on Iranian oil that is set to expire on Sunday.
“That was oil that was on the water prior to March 11,” he said, referring to when the United States first lifted sanctions on Russian oil. “So all of that has been used.”
The last-minute renewal of Russia’s sanctions exemption came as Iran announced earlier on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway that once carried a fifth of the world’s oil, was completely open to all commercial ships.
President Trump celebrated the move on social media, claiming that “Hormuz Strait situation is over” and that Iran had agreed to never close the waterway again.
Iran made no such commitment. Its foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, only went so far as to say that the waterway would be open “for the remaining period of cease-fire.” The cease-fire between the United States and Iran is set to expire next week with American and Iranian negotiators expected to meet for another round of peace talks in Pakistan soon.
Mr. Trump has downplayed the economic repercussions of the conflict and brushed aside soaring oil and gas prices since the start of the war on Feb. 28. The price of regular gasoline in the United States jumped 25 percent from February to March, the highest monthly percentage increase on record. The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, has failed to mellow despite the release of a record amount of oil from countries’ strategic reserves.
While news of the strait reopening prompted a sharp decline in oil prices on Friday, the future of the waterway remained murky. Iran and the United States were still at odds over the U.S. military’s blockade of Iranian ports. Mr. Araghchi, who is also Iran’s top negotiator, said the country would close the strait again if the U.S. military continued its blockade of Iranian ports.
Reporting from Washington and New York
President Trump’s announcement that Iran had agreed to “completely open” the Strait of Hormuz bolstered hopes that the two governments were keeping alive a cease-fire agreement reached last week and nearing a framework for further negotiations to reach a lasting peace deal.
The announcement came a day after Mr. Trump said U.S. and Iranian teams would probably meet this weekend for a second round of talks, as Iranian officials said the sides were nearing agreement on a document that sets a formal framework and a 60-day clock for negotiations.
It also followed Israel’s agreement on Thursday to pause its military campaign in Lebanon, which Iran had called a violation of its cease-fire deal with the United States.
Shadowing the optimism was a warning from Tehran that ships could again be denied passage through the strait if Mr. Trump does not lift the U.S. naval blockade he placed on Iranian ports this week. Writing on his Truth Social account on Friday, Mr. Trump said the blockade will remain in place until any deal with Iran is “100% complete.” The U.S. military affirmed that the blockade would last until Mr. Trump ended it.
Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, warned in a social media post that if the United States continued its blockade, the Strait of Hormuz would not remain open, and that passage would be based on Iranian authorization. Mr. Ghalibaf, a lead Iranian negotiator in Islamabad last weekend, said that Mr. Trump on Friday had made several false claims but did not specify which he was referring to.
Earlier on Friday, Mr. Trump had said that with the Strait of Hormuz reopened, the process of clinching a final peace deal with Iran would “go very quickly.” But analysts called that unlikely.
“We’re still miles away from a comprehensive agreement,” said Ali Vaez, an Iran expert with Crisis Group, a global conflict resolution organization.
Writing on his Truth Social account on Friday, Mr. Trump also said that the naval blockade he placed on Iranian ports this week would remain in place until his negotiations with Tehan are “100% complete.” It is unclear how that ultimatum might change Iran’s negotiating posture. The U.S. military affirmed that the blockade would last until Mr. Trump ended it.
The path to a deal continues to run through Pakistan, whose army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, has been encamped in Tehran since Wednesday. Mr. Munir has been facilitating talks over a three-page memorandum of understanding that establishes a general framework for a deal, according to three senior Iranian officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about sensitive diplomacy.
Pakistan hosted a first round of direct talks between U.S. and Iranian officials last weekend, and the sides nearly reached agreement on the document, according to Iran’s foreign minister, before the session ended in public acrimony. The White House has not confirmed that claim and did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
But U.S. officials said the White House was optimistic that a deal was relatively close, even if key issues remain unresolved. In several brief interviews with reporters on Friday, Mr. Trump suggested that Washington and Tehran had reached agreements on Iran’s nuclear program and the release of billions of dollars of frozen Iranian funds. But those matters remain unresolved and are the trickiest part of the negotiations, the U.S. officials said.
American officials briefed on the talks said that Mr. Trump’s remarks were intended to press Iran toward agreement. All the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about sensitive diplomacy.
The Iranian and Pakistani officials said the memo would set a 60-day window for further talks to resolve matters including Iran’s nuclear program, which Mr. Trump wants halted, and Iran’s demands for relief from U.S. economic sanctions.
But even two months is most likely an unrealistic time frame, experts said, if only given the technical complexity of matters like retrieving Iran’s 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium — at least some of which is believed to be buried under the rubble of U.S. airstrikes last summer.
“Making these deals durable requires rigor and clarity, which takes expertise and time,” said Jon Finer, who spent countless hours negotiating a 2015 nuclear agreement with Tehran as chief of staff to Secretary of State John Kerry. “The risk of rushing is that you don’t sweat the details and miss something important or you don’t actually have a meeting of the minds at all, and it unravels.”
Mr. Vaez added that the Trump administration’s diplomatic track record shows little skill at nailing down the fine points of complicated negotiations. In Gaza, Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Trump administration’s efforts to settle conflicts faltered over misunderstandings and ambiguities.
“They need to pin down every single detail. And that requires the kind of diplomacy that this administration has demonstrated again and again it is not adept at,” Mr. Vaez said.
Israel also remains a wild card in the Iran talks, a day after Mr. Trump appeared to force a reluctant Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a cease-fire in Lebanon in order to secure Iran’s agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
U.S. officials deny any connection between the Iran talks and Israel’s war against Lebanon-based Hezbollah, Iran’s most important proxy force. But analysts called that implausible, saying that Mr. Trump clearly decided his needs in Iran outweighed Mr. Netanyahu’s determination to smash Hezbollah.
Mr. Trump only bolstered that view when he wrote on social media on Friday of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon: “They are PROHIBITED from doing so by the USA. Enough is enough.”
Mr. Netanyahu “had no choice,” said Aaron David Miller, a veteran Middle East negotiator now with the Carnegie Institute for International Peace. Mr. Miller noted that Mr. Netanyahu was counting on Mr. Trump’s support ahead of Israeli elections expected this fall. “He couldn’t say no, let alone cross Trump.”
But other analysts said that Iranian leaders remain suspicious of Mr. Netanyahu, who supports continuing the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, ordered strikes killing much of Iran’s political leadership, and, they fear, might try to scuttle Mr. Trump’s peace efforts.
Mr. Trump made several heady claims of diplomatic progress on Friday, saying in an interview with Axios that he believed he could achieve a deal with Iran “in a day or two” and telling a NewsNation reporter that Iran had agreed to stop enriching uranium. But Mr. Trump has made numerous exaggerated claims over the course of the war about the state of his negotiations with Tehran.
It is possible that Iran has offered to suspend uranium enrichment — the process that refines the fissile material needed for a nuclear bomb — for a finite period of time. Iran has previously offered to stop enrichment for 5 years. But Mr. Trump has demanded that Iran permanently agree to “zero enrichment” on its own soil, a position Iran has rejected for decades.
The Iranian officials said that Iran has agreed to suspend its enrichment activity for only 10 years, followed by another 10 years of minimal enrichment for laboratory research.
Iran has also agreed to dilute the stockpile and either keep it on its own soil under the watch of international inspectors, or ship it to Russia. Dilution would also take place in phases sequenced to the release of Iranian funds and lifting of American sanctions, the Iranian officials said.
Iran is also seeking access to an estimated $27 billion in assets frozen by the United States, mostly in the form of oil revenues held in Iraq, Qatar, Japan, Germany and China.
“The United States will not negotiate through the press, and anything not announced by President Trump or the White House should be considered speculation,” said Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman.
Even if the sides can reach an agreement in theory, it remains unclear how they can overcome the extreme mistrust and commit to action. Mr. Trump has depicted Iran’s leaders as “crazy” and “lunatics.” Iranian officials say that Mr. Trump has repeatedly burned them, and some say it would be folly to trust his word.
They note that in his first term, Mr. Trump unilaterally exited the 2015 nuclear deal even though Tehran was complying with its terms and imposed heavy economic sanctions on Iran.
In June and then again in February he began diplomatic talks with Tehran over its nuclear program only to launch military strikes without first declaring those negotiations dead.
While many analysts argue that Iran gained an upper hand over Mr. Trump by demonstrating its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz and choke global energy and chemical supplies, there were new signs of Iran’s own dire economic position, which Trump officials have insisted will force Iran to accept an agreement.
On Wednesday the Iranian government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said that Iran may have sustained at least $270 billion in damages from the war, according to initial assessments.
And Iran’s main business newspaper, Donyaye Eghtesad, reported on Friday that reconstruction would take at least 12 years. Each month of fighting amounted to a five-year economic setback, the paper said, adding that total losses were triple the government’s annual budget.
Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, said on Friday that the blockade against ships entering or exiting Iranian ports would remain until President Trump suspended it.
“As the president announced earlier today, U.S. forces in the Middle East continue to fully enforce the maritime blockade against ships entering or exiting Iranian ports in coastal areas,” Admiral Cooper said in a conference call with reporters. “It will remain in effect until further notice.”
So far, 19 Iran-linked tankers or cargo vessels have returned to the country’s ports after a line of more than a dozen U.S. Navy ships strung across the Gulf of Oman intercepted them, and ordered them by radio to reverse course, the admiral said.
None of the commercial ships have fired on U.S. Navy ships or aircraft or had armed Iranian navy escorts, he added.
Admiral Cooper said that U.S. intelligence analysts are monitoring “several vessels of interest,” both inside and outside the blockade boundary, that could try to evade the blockade.
“We have eyes on every single one of them,” he said.
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Thursday that U.S. military commanders elsewhere in the world, and especially in the Indo-Pacific region, would “actively pursue any Iranian flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran.”
The United States is currently monitoring “a handful” of such vessels, said a U.S. military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. A spokeswoman for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command declined to comment on any ongoing or future operations.
A 10-day cease-fire that Lebanon and Israel agreed to appeared to be holding on Friday, but absent from the agreement was one of the two warring parties: Hezbollah, the Iran-backed, Lebanese militia that the Israeli military had been fighting.
In statements after the U.S.-brokered truce was announced, Hezbollah made vague reference to the cease-fire but did not commit to adhering to it. The group set off the latest round of fighting last month by attacking Israel in solidarity with Iran, soon after the start of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign there. Israel responded to Hezbollah’s attacks by launching airstrikes across Lebanon and widening a ground invasion of the country’s south.
The truce’s viability could hinge on Lebanon’s ability to curb Hezbollah, which it has struggled to do for decades.
For years, the Lebanese government has been caught between Western demands to disarm the group, which the United States has long designated a terrorist organization, and fears of inflaming sectarian tensions, which were at the heart of a bloody 15-year civil war in Lebanon that ended in 1990.
Hezbollah is a Shiite militant group that emerged in the 1980s with Iranian backing and grew into Lebanon’s most powerful fighting force. To its supporters, it was a protector of the Shiite Muslims of Lebanon from Israel, which occupied southern Lebanon for nearly 20 years, as well as from other sects’ militias in the country. It also ran a network of social services like schools, clinics and hospitals.
Hezbollah still has political influence in Lebanon, though less than it once did. The group exerts de facto control over large areas of the country’s south and poses a credible challenge to the Lebanese government’s authority.
In 2023, Hezbollah attacked Israel in solidarity with Hamas, the Palestinian group that is also backed by Iran. Israel responded with brutal force, wiping out many of Hezbollah’s top commanders, including its leader, Hassan Nasrallah; razing much of its infrastructure; and forcing it to use a chunk of its weapons arsenal.
In December 2024, the rebel uprising that toppled Bashar al-Assad — Syria’s longtime dictator and a key regional patron of Hezbollah — dealt the group another blow.
“Over the course of the 2000s, 2010s, and even into the 2020s, there was a sense that the balance of power was in favor of Hezbollah,” said Andrew Arsan, a professor of Arab history at Cambridge University. “But the war between Israel and Hezbollah from October 2023 weakened the party, both militarily as well as politically.”
After a 2024 cease-fire with Israel, Hezbollah largely avoided retaliating even as the Israeli military maintained forces in southern Lebanon and carried out near-daily airstrikes.
So, many were surprised by the intensity of Hezbollah’s barrages against Israel beginning in March. It indicated that the group had kept a sizable arsenal of rockets, missiles and drones, as well as the capacity to produce weapons locally — which was increasingly crucial for its survival as a fighting force without Syria’s backing.
The 2024 truce with Israel mandated that Lebanon take steps to disarm Hezbollah. Lebanon’s army said in January that it had made progress in efforts to restrict Hezbollah’s access to weapons, which Israel called encouraging but far from sufficient.
During the most recent fighting, the Lebanese government in effect designated Hezbollah an outlaw group by declaring its military activities illegal. The government also pushed to root out Iranian influence more broadly, including by ordering the expulsion of Tehran’s ambassador in Lebanon.
But Hezbollah’s response to those moves underscored the limits of Beirut’s authority. The group issued veiled threats to reignite domestic strife, and Iran’s ambassador, Mohammad Reza Shibani, refused to leave.
Reporting from Srifa, Kfar Dounine, Qasmiyeh, and Tyre in southern Lebanon
A 60-year-old woman did not know what she would find when she returned to her home in Srifa, a village in southern Lebanon.
The woman, Mona Nazal, had fled north in early March, when the war between Israel and Hezbollah reignited. She had not been back since. But as a temporary cease-fire went into effect on Friday morning, she rushed to her car and drove for six hours until she reached the village entrance.
Along the main street, there was almost nothing left. The pharmacy was a pile of rubble. The produce shop and tobacco stores had been cleaved in half. The roof of the wheat mill had partially caved in. Not a single building was intact.
“Gone, gone, it’s all gone,” she cried, stumbling across the dusty piles of concrete in what used to be her bedroom. “Where is the floor? Where are my drawers? I can’t even find a pillow.”
Ms. Nazal was one of thousands of people who flocked to Lebanon’s devastated south on Friday to take stock of their homes, as the temporary cease-fire between Israel and the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah went into effect.
The U.S.-brokered truce was welcomed with relief across Lebanon, which has been battered by Israeli airstrikes over the past six weeks in the second major war the country has endured in two years. The latest outbreak of fighting, which began last month after Hezbollah fired on Israel in solidarity with Tehran, has killed more than 2,100 people and displaced over a million in Lebanon, according to Lebanese authorities.
But even as families returned to their homes, many remained uneasy and uncertain about the days to come.
Unlike the cease-fire that ended the last outbreak of war in 2024 — which was indefinite — the truce announced on Thursday was set to last just 10 days. Israel has said that its forces, which invaded southern Lebanon last month, will remain in place during the pause, increasing fears that the conflict could give way to a prolonged occupation.
“I can’t express the joy I’m feeling. We didn’t sleep,” said Israa Jaber, 54, as she sat in a vehicle in traffic heading south. “But for this joy to be complete they have to extend this temporary truce. If we have to leave again, I can’t describe how disappointing it would be.”
Ms. Jaber joined the throng of cars clogging the country’s main coastal highway. Many were loaded with suitcases, mattresses and blankets that people had grabbed when they fled or collected in the weeks they spent living in relatives’ homes or schools that have been turned into shelters.
“Even if my home is destroyed, I will stay on the land — I just want to be back,” said Abbas Shami, 40, as he hopped out of his stationery car and tightened yellow string that held down three mattresses that he had stacked on his car’s roof.
His car was at the edge of a four-lane traffic jam that stretched for miles along the highway and lead to a bottleneck at the Litani River, which divides northern and southern Lebanon. Israel had bombed all of the main bridges across the river in recent weeks, so cars had to snake one by one along a makeshift dirt crossing next to where a bridge once stood in Qasmiyeh, a town near the coast.
Soumaya Ahmed Fadel, 46, stood on the partially destroyed bridge and watched as Lebanese Army soldiers in excavators tried to widen the one-lane crossing. Her 12-year-old son, Ghalab, leaned against her, clutching the bottom of her jacket. “I just want to sleep in my bed,” he said.
“That’s if we find our house intact,” his mother reminded him.
After she and her family were caught in the traffic on their way home to the village of Touline, Ms. Fadel walked a few miles, squeezing between cars with her son who said he could not wait to get home. She did not tell him what she had already learned on the local news: Much of their village had been destroyed.
“I am too tired of war,” she said. “Since I was born, I’ve been living from one war to another war to another war.”
Beyond the bottleneck at Qasmiyeh, the traffic thinned as people took off along winding roads through the southern hills and valleys to their villages.
Just outside the village of Kfar Dounine, Inaya Yousef, 46, drove in her family’s rickety BMW, the bottom of the car scraping against the pavement at every turn. Mattresses poked out from its trunk, and three massive bags filled with clothes, food and children’s toys weighed on the roof.
When the car’s engine finally gave out on a steep hill near their home, Ms. Yousef and her children clambered out of the car. As a strong gust of wind swept across the valley, Ms. Yousef spread her arms.
“Breathe! Breathe!” she yelled. “This is the smell of home.”
As the day drew on, that sense of relief mingled with the harsh realities of what awaited many when they returned.
Samira Nazal, 45, arrived to find her home in Srifa completely destroyed. Late Friday afternoon, she was picking through the rubble, looking for anything she could salvage. What she wanted to find most, though, was an old family photo album. “It’s the most precious thing we have,” she said, standing on the rubble of her home.
Her 70-year-old neighbor, Wahab Saadiyha Dakroub, leaned on a twisted piece of metal from the grocery store that had once been under Ms. Nazal’s apartment. When she saw another neighbor walked by, she gasped.
“Hello! Hello!” She cried out, throwing her arms around her. “Welcome back, my dear.”
Nearby in the seaside city of Tyre, the streets remained relatively quiet on Friday as its residents remained on edge. A barrage of Israeli strikes had hit the city at 11:56 p.m. Thursday night, four minutes before the cease-fire took effect.
The strikes leveled four adjacent buildings and was the most destructive single bombing in Tyre to occur during the war, local authorities said.
By late Friday afternoon, emergency workers had recovered 14 bodies from the wreckage and were looking for seven others who were presumed dead under the rubble.
Standing across the road, Amad Mounwiss, 40, stood quietly taking in the scene. Her 20-year-old son had been visiting his grandfather in one of the apartment buildings and died in the strikes.
They had already recovered his body, she explained. But she thought that maybe looking at the wreckage, being close to where he stood only hours earlier — alive — would help her make sense of it all.
“Why? Why?” she asked, fighting back tears. “There’s no reason for this.”
Read the full story at nyt News.
Once close enough for an acquisition, Stripe and Airwallex are now going after each other
Source: TechCrunch • Published: 4/18/2026, 10:50:11 AM
Jack Zhang was 34 years old, three and a half years into running a startup, and sitting across from one of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley. Michael Moritz of Sequoia had invited him to his home — a place with, Zhang recalls, a couple of floors and a view straight to the Golden Gate Bridge — to make the case for selling.
Stripe wanted to buy Airwallex for $1.2 billion. At the time, the Melbourne company had around $2 million in annualized revenue. The math was almost pretty irresistable: a revenue multiple somewhere near 600 times. Patrick Collison, Moritz argued, was a generational founder. The deal would “compound” into something extraordinary. Zhang listened. He walked around San Francisco for two weeks, restless, unable to think straight. At one point, he said yes.
Then he flew nearly 8,000 miles back home.
“I really went deep on what motivates me to build Airwallex,” he said early this week, speaking to this editor from overseas. “I was three and a half years into the business. The business was growing 100 times in 2018. And I only just sort of tasted what it [was like] to be an entrepreneur. And that’s what I’d been dreaming about.”
Two of his three co-founders had voted against the deal, which helped. But he says the clearest signal came from looking at the whiteboard back in his office. The vision was still there, unfinished: to build the financial infrastructure that lets any business operate anywhere in the world as if it were a local company.
That decision is looking increasingly prescient. Airwallex now claims more than $1.3 billion in annualized revenue and is growing at 85% year-over-year. It processes approaching $300 billion in annualized transaction volume. None of it has come easily — and Zhang argues that’s precisely the point.
It’s a conviction that runs a lot deeper than business strategy. Zhang grew up in Qingdao, a port city in northeastern China, and moved to Melbourne at 15 without his parents, barely speaking English, living with a host family. When his family’s finances collapsed, he took on four jobs to get through a computer science degree at the University of Melbourne, according to the Australian Financial Review — bartending, washing dishes, working graveyard shifts at a petrol station, picking lemons on a farm in the school holidays, which he has called the hardest job he ever had. He went on to spend years writing trading code in the front office of an Australian investment bank, a job that paid well and never felt “deeply fulfilling.”
He was running a Melbourne coffee shop when the idea for Airwallex took shape. While trying to pay coffee bean suppliers in Brazil, Indonesia, and Guatemala, his co-founder Max Li kept watching payments disappear into correspondent banking systems — flagged and frozen by American intermediary banks enforcing OFAC sanctions rules, sometimes bouncing back weeks after they were sent. “That pushed me to really look at how correspondent banking works,” Zhang said, “how SWIFT works, and how we could build our own global money movement network.”
That’s still the idea, just scaled up considerably. Airwallex now holds close to 90 financial licenses across 50 markets. Zhang estimates Stripe has roughly half that number at best. Getting those licenses has been immensely time consuming — in Japan alone, the process took seven years. In some emerging markets, the company had to acquire shell companies whose licenses were no longer being issued by central banks, then rebuild the technology underneath them entirely.
“You can’t really vibe-code an integration with Mexico’s central bank,” Zhang said. “We have to have a secure room — you have to do a biometric scan just to walk in to access the central bank integration.”
The point of holding these licenses isn’t regulatory window dressing. In Japan, for instance, Stripe and Square can process payments, but they’re required to immediately transfer funds out to the merchant’s bank account. Airwallex, with its fund transfer operator license, can hold those funds inside its ecosystem. That means a customer can issue bank accounts, issue cards, and spend money without it ever leaving the platform.
The foreign exchange economics alone are substantial: a U.S. merchant settling transactions in Australian dollars avoids the 2% to 3% conversion fee that processors like Stripe typically charge to move money back into U.S. dollars — and can use those local balances to pay local vendors, run payroll, and cover digital marketing expenses, all at interbank rates.
“You don’t really operate like a U.S. company anymore,” Zhang said. “You operate like a company with entities around the world, but without needing to physically set up those entities.”
The slow build was intentional, and Zhang has a framework for it that he returns to often: the “path of maximum resistance.” Every license, every bank integration, every local payment rail that Airwallex painstakingly assembled created a layer that makes it harder to compete against. “It took us six and a half years to get to $100 million in annual recurring revenue,” Zhang said. “But after that, it took just over three years to get to a billion.”
The competitive logic, in his telling, comes down to something basic about what it means to own infrastructure versus riding someone else’s. If you don’t control the end-to-end payment workflow and something goes wrong, you can’t access the underlying data to explain it to your customer. You can’t extend new products cleanly on top of someone else’s stack. “Building on top of other infrastructure,” he said, “is simply not scalable.”
For most of its life, Airwallex and Stripe have mostly operated in different geographies, selling to different buyers. That’s changing. As Stripe pushes deeper into international markets, and Airwallex makes its first serious moves into the United States, the overlap is growing.
The buyer for Airwallex has historically been the CFO’s office in Australia and Southeast Asia, where the company is already well-established — finance directors, treasury teams — which puts it in a different sales motion than Stripe, whose customer acquisition has been driven largely by U.S. developers choosing a default starting point for a new company. More than 90% of Airwallex customers land first on a business account product, and payments and spend management follow from there. Over half are using multiple products, says Zhang.
Still, there are challenges that Zhang doesn’t try to downplay. The biggest may be that Stripe is Silicon Valley’s golden child, its privately held shares having minted millionaires across the tech industry. Another is the accompanying brand gap. Airwallex needs to embed itself in the thinking of engineers and developers — not just finance teams — so that founders reach for it instinctively. “Our brand is just not there yet,” he said. “That’s a harder competition to win.”
It’s a competition being watched closely from a variety of vantage points. Sequoia backed Airwallex early — though the deal was sourced through Sequoia Capital China, which has since spun out and rebranded as Hongshan — and remains one of the company’s largest shareholders. The investment firm Greenoaks Capital holds stakes in both companies, too. Zhang shrugged off any suggestion of awkwardness around those overlapping cap tables. The investors, he noted, are betting on a large market.
Still, it brings up the valuation question. Stripe was valued at $159 billion in a February tender offer — up 74% from a year earlier — after processing $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025. Airwallex, assigned an $8 billion valuation in December, is valued at roughly a twentieth of that. But according to Zhang, Stripe’s payment volume is only about six times Airwallex’s, not 20 times. At 85% annual growth and projecting $2 billion in revenue within the next year, Airwallex is closing the revenue gap faster than the valuation gap would suggest.
Whether the market eventually notices is a different question — one that an IPO, which Zhang says is at least three to five years away, would force into the open.
In the meantime, Zhang says he’s focused on longer-horizon targets: a million customers by 2030, $20 billion in annual revenue, average revenue per customer growing from around $12,000 to $13,000 today to roughly $20,000. A suite of AI-powered autonomous finance products — agents that don’t just surface data but actually execute transactions — is rolling out now. The thesis is that a decade of financial data across the entire corporate finance stack, from revenue collection to treasury management to vendor payments and expenses, has created a training set that no competitor can replicate overnight, he suggests.
Now to see if all that hard work is enough to eat into Stripe’s market share. For now, the competition seems to be playing out at a distance. Zhang and Collison were never friends, but they were friendly while merger talks were ongoing years ago. Last year, Zhang and Collison were both at Greenoaks Capital’s annual gathering. They didn’t speak.
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Read the full story at TechCrunch.
How Trump Helped Pope Leo Find His Voice
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/18/2026, 9:30:09 AM
For months after his election last year, Pope Leo XIV often seemed quiet on sensitive issues, speaking carefully to soothe tensions both within the Catholic world and with global leaders beyond it.
This was the week he found his voice.
On Monday, Leo unexpectedly addressed the Trump administration head-on after weeks of avoiding direct confrontation. Since early March, the pope had been criticizing the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran without mentioning Mr. Trump by name.
On Wednesday, in Cameroon, Leo — standing next to Paul Biya, Cameroon’s authoritarian president and the world’s oldest and longest serving leader — called on authorities to abandon an “idolatrous thirst for profit.”
On Thursday, the pope made perhaps his most full-throated exhortation yet. In what seemed like an allusion to American efforts to use Christianity to justify the Iran war, he expressed “woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.” After days of barbs from Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance, Leo was not backing down.
It has been a watershed week for a pope who started his papacy last May facing constant comparisons with his predecessor Francis, the freewheeling pontiff whose revolutionary style and urge to shake up sacred rituals divided followers and earned him derision from conservative Catholics, particularly in the United States.
Leo, by contrast, has a mild-mannered temperament. Until recently, he had tended to deliver sober speeches rooted in scripture and careful nuance to avoid confrontational language. He wore traditional vestments and spoke Latin during Mass, both moves that diverged from Francis and pleased conservatives. From the very beginning of his papacy, he spoke about unity within the Catholic church, appearing to want to calm the church and draw conservatives back to the papal fold. And though he stood up for migrants and criticized U.S. attacks on Venezuela, he took a cautious tone while doing so, and tended to stick to scripted remarks.
Some followers even hinted that he was, well, a bit boring.
But that perception may be what allowed the pope to strike a more powerful tone now.
Early on, Leo was “taking care not to be perceived as simply Francis 2.0, or as somebody who would neatly be pigeonholed” into partisan political categories, said Nicholas Hayes-Mota, an expert on theological ethics at Santa Clara University, a Catholic institution in California.
“I think that was really important to him and very prudent, frankly,” Mr. Hayes-Mota said. “And so I think part of what’s allowing him to be more outspoken now is that he took his time.”
The pope’s comments came after a tumultuous period in which the Vatican found itself playing defense through several swirling news cycles.
After Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called on the American people to pray for victory in Iran “in the name of Jesus Christ,” the pope said in a Sunday homily that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” Leo later told Americans to call their representatives in Congress to protest the war.
An unsubstantiated report then emerged that Pentagon officials had conveyed a menacing message to a Vatican official. The Vatican and the U.S. government acknowledged that a meeting had occurred in January but denied any hostility.
Then on Sunday, three influential American cardinals appeared on “60 Minutes” and criticized various Trump administration policies, with one saying that the Iran conflict was “not a just war.”
Hours later, Mr. Trump delivered a long screed against Leo on Truth Social, the president’s social media platform, calling him “terrible for foreign policy” and “catering to the Radical Left.”
Until then, Leo had been careful not to confront Mr. Trump directly.
But on Monday, Leo seemed to have had enough of prudence.
Speaking with unusual spontaneity to journalists while flying to Africa on Monday, he said that he had “no fear” of the Trump administration and that he would “continue to speak out loudly against war.”
When I asked him on the plane about Mr. Trump’s remarks on Truth Social, he said the site’s name was “ironic.”
The reason for the pope’s shift is still unclear, but some analysts say the pope felt he had no choice but to adopt a more direct approach.
Christopher White, a senior fellow at the Georgetown Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, said the pope likely decided he was “going to be the adult in the room.”
“Leo wasn’t looking for a fight,” Mr. White added. “One of the reasons he found his voice is out of necessity.”
Some wondered if the pope, by ratcheting up his rhetoric, would start to alienate the conservatives who have so far supported him.
But the antagonism of the Trump administration may give Leo more leeway, said Mr. Hayes-Mota, the Santa Clara academic.
“I think the fact that the administration has reacted in the way it has, that Trump went directly on the attack, has actually helped rather than hindered the pope’s cause,” Mr. Hayes-Mota said. “It makes it look as if the president is the one trying to drag the pope into the mud.” The pope, Mr. Hayes-Mota added, “is really representing something else, a kind of higher moral authority.”
The pope has not limited his pointed language to the United States.
On Monday in Algeria, which is led by an authoritarian government, Leo told those “who hold positions of authority” that they should “promote a vibrant, dynamic and free civil society.”
Then in an address to President Biya in the Cameroonian capital on Wednesday, the pope said, quoting St. Augustine, that “those who rule serve those whom they seem to command.”
A day later, the pope visited northwest Cameroon, a region wracked by conflict between English-speaking separatists and the Francophone government’s military over the last decade. Praising local peacemakers, he lamented how the world had been “ravaged by a handful of tyrants.”
A local bishop, Aloysius Abangalo Fondong, said he was not surprised by Leo’s words.
“He’s not a politician, he’s the pastor of the church, the vicar of Christ in the world,” Bishop Fondong said. “And as the Holy Father said, he’s not afraid to speak the truth.”
Yet some Catholics fear the pope’s more robust talk will do little to propel change.
“I fear that it may not have reached leaders who are genuinely open to its call,” said the Rev. Ludovic Lado, a Jesuit priest and academic from Cameroon.
Motoko Rich is the Times bureau chief in Rome, where she covers Italy, the Vatican and Greece.
Read the full story at nyt News.
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