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- Iran War Live Updates: Trump Says Lebanon Cease-Fire Is Extended by 3 Weeks — nyt News
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Iran War Live Updates: Trump Says Lebanon Cease-Fire Is Extended by 3 Weeks
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/24/2026, 1:39:44 PM
Tehran12:07 p.m. April 24
Pinned
Abdi Latif DahirEuan Ward and Qasim Nauman
Abdi Latif Dahir and Euan Ward reported from Beirut, Lebanon.
There were no reports of major clashes between the Israeli military and the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah in Lebanon early Friday, a day after President Trump announced a three-week extension of the cease-fire there.
Mr. Trump made the announcement after hosting a meeting at the White House between Israeli and Lebanese diplomats. Hezbollah, which did not have representatives at the talks, did not immediately comment on the announcement. Neither did Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel or President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon.
Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported Israeli airstrikes and artillery fire overnight in several towns and villages in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military said early Friday that it had struck two rocket launchers in southern Lebanon. It said one had fired rockets toward northern Israel and that the other was loaded and posed a threat to Israeli soldiers.
Under the terms of the cease-fire, Israel has the right to act in self-defense but not to carry out offensive operations against Lebanese targets.
A durable peace would hinge on Lebanon’s ability to rein in Hezbollah, which exerts de facto control over large areas of the country’s south.
Stopping the fighting in Lebanon is considered crucial to advancing any peace agreement between Iran and the United States and Israel. Since the 10-day cease-fire took effect in Lebanon this month, the number of Israeli airstrikes and Hezbollah attacks has fallen dramatically.
In the days after a separate cease-fire paused the Iran war, hostilities between the United States and Iran have shifted to the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides have in recent days seized ships they said were violating their respective restrictions on using the waterway, normally a busy conduit for global oil and gas supplies.
There has been little public indication that either Washington or Tehran wants to restart peace talks. Mr. Trump on Thursday ordered the U.S. Navy to “shoot and kill any boat” that is laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
Pentagon briefing: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are scheduled to hold a news conference on the military campaign against Iran at 8 a.m. Eastern time on Friday.
High price tag: White House officials have refused to estimate the cost of the Iran war so far, but two independent groups say the expense has been staggering: between $28 billion and $35 billion, or just under $1 billion a day.
Reporting from Washington
Since the Iran war began in late February, the United States has burned through around 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China, close to the total number remaining in the U.S. stockpile. The military has fired off more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly 10 times the number it currently buys each year.
The Pentagon used more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war, at more than $4 million a pop, and more than 1,000 Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles, leaving inventories worrisomely low, according to internal Defense Department estimates and congressional officials.
The Iran war has significantly drained much of the U.S. military’s global supply of munitions, and forced the Pentagon to rush bombs, missiles and other hardware to the Middle East from commands in Asia and Europe. The drawdowns have left these regional commands less ready to confront potential adversaries like Russia and China, and it has forced the United States to find ways to scale up production to address the depletions, Trump administration and congressional officials say.
The conflict has also underscored the Pentagon’s overreliance on excessively expensive missiles and munitions, especially air-defense interceptors, as well as concerns about whether the defense industry can develop cheaper arms, especially attack drones, far more quickly.
The Defense Department has not disclosed how many munitions it used in 38 days of war before a cease-fire took effect two weeks ago. The Pentagon says it hit more than 13,000 targets, but officials say that figure masks the vast number of bombs and missiles it used because warplanes, attack planes and artillery typically strike large targets multiple times.
White House officials have refused to estimate the cost of the conflict so far, but two independent groups say the expense is staggering: between $28 billion and $35 billion, or just under $1 billion a day.
In the first two days alone, defense officials have told lawmakers, the military used $5.6 billion of munitions.
To restore the U.S. global stockpile to its previous size, the United States will have to make tough choices about where to maintain its military strength in the meantime. “At current production rates, reconstituting what we have expended could take years,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said this week.
“The United States has many munitions with adequate inventories, but some critical ground-attack and missile-defense munitions were short before the war and are even shorter now,” said Mark F. Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which recently published a study estimating the status of key munitions.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that “the entire premise of this story is false.” She added: “The United States of America has the most powerful military in the world, fully loaded with more than enough weapons and munitions, in stockpiles here at home and all around the globe, to effectively defend the homeland and achieve any military operation directed by the commander in chief.”
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, declined to comment on “any specific theater requirements or detail our global resource capabilities,” citing operational security.
Some Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the chairman of the subcommittee that funds the Pentagon, have pressed for an increase in spending on munitions production over several administrations. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has made that goal a top priority during his tenure.
Making things more perilous for the Pentagon, officials say, is that the Defense Department is waiting for Congress to approve additional funding before it can pay weapons manufacturers to replenish the depleted American supply. In January, the administration announced that it had secured seven-year agreements with major defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, to increase production capacity for defense systems like missile interceptors.
The agreement called for quadrupling the production of precision-guided munitions and THAAD missile interceptors. Defense manufacturers, for their part, agreed to fund factory expansions in exchange for secured long-term orders.
But officials said there had been no movement to actually begin the expanded production, because the Pentagon was scrambling to find the funding.
In the meantime, the military is using its existing weapons supplies at steep rates to meet Central Command’s immediate needs in the Iran war. Certain munition levels are shrinking faster than others.
The Pentagon, for example, has committed most of its inventory of stealthy, long-range cruise missiles to the fight against Iran. These missiles, called Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range, or JASSM-ER, are launched from fighters and bombers and have a range of more than 600 miles. They are designed to penetrate hard targets outside the range of enemy air defenses.
Since the war started, the military has used about 1,100 JASSM-ER missiles, which cost roughly $1.1 million apiece, leaving roughly 1,500 in the military’s inventories, according to internal Pentagon estimates, a U.S. military official and a congressional official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential combat assessments.
Tomahawks, which cost about $3.6 million each, are long-range cruise missiles that have been widely used for U.S. warfighting since the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. They remain a key munition for potential future wars, including one in Asia.
“While sufficient munitions exist to wage this war, high expenditure of Tomahawks and other missiles in Operation Epic Fury creates risks for the United States in other theaters — particularly the Western Pacific,” concluded a C.S.I.S. study, which estimated the remaining Tomahawk stockpiles to be around 3,000 missiles.
Patriot interceptor missiles can cost nearly $4 million each. The United States produced about 600 of them in all of 2025. More than 1,200 have been used in the war so far, according to internal Pentagon estimates and congressional officials.
Overall, the cost of the war so far is between $25 billion and $35 billion, according to a study this month by the American Enterprise Institute compiled by Elaine McCusker, a senior Pentagon official during the first Trump administration. Mr. Cancian of C.S.I.S. said in an email that he and his analysts put the cost of the conflict so far at about $28 billion.
The military is also incurring unexpected costs from damaged or destroyed aircraft. In the Navy SEAL Team 6 operation to rescue a downed Air Force officer in Iran, the military had to destroy two MC-130 cargo planes and at least three MH-6 helicopters inside them after the planes’ nose gear got stuck in the wet sand of a makeshift airstrip. Mr. Cancian estimated the total cost of the lost aircraft at about $275 million. Three replacement planes eventually flew the airman and the commandos to safety, but the Pentagon did not want sensitive technology from the aircraft to fall into Iranian hands.
All regional military commanders are feeling the strain of shrinking munitions stocks.
In Europe, the war has led to depletions in weapons systems critical for defending the eastern flank of NATO from Russian aggression, according to Pentagon information reviewed by The New York Times.
A problem described as serious was the loss of surveillance and attack drones. The demands of the Iran war have also curtailed exercises and training. According to military officials, this hurts the ability to mount offensive operations in Europe, as well as deterrence of potential Russian attacks.
Asked about the shortcomings, Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, the head of U.S. European Command, said in a statement, “Our warfighters are proud of the support we’ve provided to USCENTCOM in support of President Trump’s historic operations against Iran.”
But the biggest impact has been on troops in Asia.
Before the war with Iran started, American military commanders redirected the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group from the South China Sea to the Middle East. Since then, two Marine Expeditionary Units, each with about 2,200 Marines, have been sent to the Middle East from the Pacific. The Pentagon has also moved sophisticated air defenses from Asia to bolster protection against Iran’s drones and rockets.
The redirected weapons include Patriot missiles and interceptors from the THAAD system in South Korea — the only Asian ally hosting the advanced missile defense system, deployed by the Pentagon to counter North Korea’s growing missile threat. Now, for the first time, the system’s interceptors are being moved away, according to American officials.
U.S. readiness in the Pacific was hurt earlier by the Pentagon’s deployment of warships and aircraft to the Middle East after the Israel-Gaza war began in October 2023 and after Houthi militia forces in Yemen started attacking ships in the Red Sea to support the Palestinians, the officials say.
The monthlong bombing campaign against the Houthis last year — an operation the Pentagon called Rough Rider — was much larger than the Trump administration initially disclosed at the time. The Pentagon used up about $200 million of munitions in the first three weeks alone, U.S. officials said. The costs of the overall operation far exceeded $1 billion when operational and personnel expenses were taken into account, the officials added.
The American ships and aircraft, as well as the service members working on them, are being pushed at what the military calls a high operating tempo. Even basic equipment maintenance becomes an issue under those grinding conditions.
A spokeswoman for Adm. Samuel J. Paparo Jr., the head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command, declined to comment on the arms diverted from Asia to the Middle East.
Admiral Paparo largely sidestepped the issue of stockpile shortages during a Senate hearing on Tuesday, acknowledging only that “there are finite limits to the magazine.”
Michael Schwirtz and Adam Goldman contributed reporting from London. John Ismay, Helene Cooper and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from Washington.
After President Trump announced a three-week extension to a cease-fire between Lebanon and Israel, the Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors, who were in the Oval Office, thanked him.
Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, said that thanks to Trump’s leadership, “the possibility of degrading Hezbollah and liberating Lebanon from their occupation is real.” He said he hoped Israel and Lebanon could “formalize peace in the near future.”
The Lebanese ambassador, Nada Hamadeh Moawad, thanked Trump for “presiding over this historic moment.” She said: “I think with your help, your support, we can make Lebanon great again.”
Asked about a potential durable peace deal between Lebanon and Israel, Trump said that “I think there’s a great chance. They are friends about the same things and they are enemies on the same things.” Lebanon and Israel have been periodically at war since 1978, in large part over the issue of Palestine. The Lebanese government does not control Hezbollah, the Iran-backed force fighting Israel.
President Trump said that the cease-fire between Lebanon and Israel would be extended by three weeks, after a meeting with diplomats from Lebanon and Israel in the Oval Office. He added that he looked forward “in the near future to hosting the Prime Minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu, and the President of Lebanon, Joseph Aoun.” No such meeting has been scheduled.
Luke Broadwater and David E. Sanger are White House correspondents. They reported from Washington.
In recent weeks, President Trump has been talking about a substance he says is key to ending the United States’ war against Iran: “nuclear dust.”
In the president’s telling, Iran’s nuclear program was so badly damaged by U.S. bombs last year that all that remains under the rubble is a sort of powdery aftermath.
The phrase “nuclear dust” seemed designed to diminish the importance of what Mr. Trump is actually talking about — Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium, which is stored in canisters about the size of large scuba tanks.
The material is not, in fact, “dust.” It is typically a gas when stored inside the canisters, though it becomes a solid at room temperature. It is a volatile and highly toxic substance if it comes into contact with moisture and, if mishandled, can trigger a nuclear reaction.
Mr. Trump’s phrase oversimplifies the complex tasks of enriching uranium, to say nothing of negotiating an end to the war. It’s also a phrase nuclear experts say they’ve never heard before.
“I just interpreted it as Trump’s kind of colorful way of talking,” said Matthew Kroenig, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
Here’s a closer look at what Mr. Trump means when he talks about “nuclear dust,” and why it’s important for an end to the conflict.
Mr. Trump is referring chiefly to the uranium Iran has enriched to 60 percent, near the 90 percent purity normally used to make a bomb. There is no use for fuel enriched to that level for, say, producing nuclear power. So it is a warning sign to the international community that Iran could quickly convert the fuel to bomb-grade, even though there would still be many steps to then build a nuclear bomb.
The United States struck three key nuclear sites in June, including a complex outside Isfahan, where much of the near-bomb grade material was believed to be stored.
“It’s not yet bomb-grade, but it’s on the way there, and it was being stored on the nuclear facility at Isfahan,” Mr. Kroenig said. “And so when Isfahan was bombed, that material was presumably entombed there.”
American intelligence officials believe that the Iranians dug down to gain access to the material, though there is no evidence any of it has been moved.
Uranium contains a rare radioactive isotope, called U-235, that can be used to power nuclear reactors at low enrichment levels and to fuel nuclear bombs at much higher levels. The goal of uranium enrichment is to raise the percentage levels of U-235, which is often done by running it through gas centrifuges, machines that spin at supersonic speeds to increase the purity of the fuel.
Mr. Trump has said that Iran had agreed to turn over its nuclear materials to the United States, though Tehran has denied that claim.
“The U.S.A. will get all nuclear dust,” Mr. Trump told a crowd in Arizona last week. “You know what the nuclear dust is? That was that white powdery substance created by our B-2 bombers.”
Iranian enrichment levels have been rising since Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Obama-era nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., saying the agreement wasn’t tough enough.
Mr. Trump then imposed several rounds of American sanctions on Iran. In response, Tehran repeatedly moved beyond the strict limits that the agreement had placed on its uranium enrichment, and began to resume production of nuclear material.
“They were enriching at very low levels before Trump administration withdrew the United States from the J.C.P.O.A.,” said Justin Logan, the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank. “So what he is calling ‘nuclear dust’ did not exist inside Iran after the signing or the first several months of the J.C.P.O.A.”
Mr. Trump acknowledges removing Iran’s enriched uranium would be difficult. On Truth Social, he said this week that “digging it out will be a long and difficult process.”
It could be almost impossible without Iranian agreement.
“This would be a mission that would take a lot of time, and there would be a lot of nerds that aren’t good at killing people that would need to be involved here,” Mr. Logan said. “So the idea of doing this while we have our swords drawn strikes me as crazy.”
He said it would be similarly difficult for the Iranians to extract the material during the war.
“Trump is correct to say that we have eyes over the target pretty much all the time, and the Iranians couldn’t just swoop in the middle of the night and spirit it out; it’s an extremely volatile substance,” he said. “We don’t know the conditions of the underground storage. Those tanks in which it has been stored might not be in great condition. It’s going to require a lot of nerds on the ground. And that’s true for the Iranians as much as it is true for us.”
President Trump, who once threatened to eliminate the entire civilization of Iran, did not escalate his rhetoric in the Oval Office on Thursday. Asked by a reporter directly, the president ruled out using a nuclear bomb.
“Why would I use a nuclear weapon when we’ve totally, in a very conventional way decimated them without it,” Trump said. “No, I wouldn’t use it. A nuclear weapon should never be allowed to be used by anybody.”
Israeli Strikes Kill Journalist in Southern Lebanon
Amal Khalil, a reporter for the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, had gained renown for her intrepidity and her resolve over two decades of covering round after round of war between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia.
On Wednesday, she was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the village of Tayri in southern Lebanon. She remained trapped under rubble for hours before emergency medics recovered her body, according to the Lebanese Civil Defense.
At her family’s home on Thursday, mourners gathered to pay their respects and vent their anger at what they saw not just as the blatant targeting of civilians but a violation of Israel’s and Hezbollah’s temporary cease-fire.
“You couldn’t ask Amal to be careful,” her brother Ali Khalil said as he received condolences. “This is the only time I know Amal’s address: she’s in the grave. She used to move nonstop from one village to another in the south,” he said. “Now I know where my sister is.”
Zeinab Faraj, a photojournalist and colleague of Ms. Khalil’s, was rescued from the house.
The Lebanese Ministry of Public Health said the Israeli military had targeted the journalists in Tayri, where they took shelter in a nearby house after an airstrike destroyed a vehicle in front of the car they were traveling in. About an hour and a half later, a second strike hit the house they were hiding in, according to a statement by Al-Akhbar.
Amid the 10-day truce between Israel and Lebanon, Israel has continued strikes against what it says are Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, citing its right to self-defense. The Israeli military denied in a statement that it had prevented rescuers from reaching the injured journalists, and said the incident was under investigation.
A spokeswoman for the Israeli military said Israeli forces had spotted two vehicles emerging from a military building used by Hezbollah. The military observed the vehicles cross what the spokeswoman called the forward defense line, determining the move to be a violation of the truce agreement.
Lebanon’s prime minister, as well as the Committee to Protect Journalists and Ms. Khalil’s employer disputed Israel’s justifications, and condemned what they said was the deliberate targeting of journalists and humanitarian workers.
“As with every act of aggression, wearing a press vest did not protect those who wore it from the treachery of the Israeli enemy,” Al-Akhbar said in a statement. “Instead, it has become a danger to journalists’ lives, as part of a systematic Israeli policy aimed at silencing anyone who seeks to expose the crimes and practices of the occupation.”
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Baysariyeh, Lebanon.
Read the full story at nyt News.
Here’s the latest.
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/24/2026, 1:39:43 PM
Tehran12:08 p.m. April 24
Pinned
Abdi Latif DahirEuan Ward and Qasim Nauman
Abdi Latif Dahir and Euan Ward reported from Beirut, Lebanon.
There were no reports of major clashes between the Israeli military and the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah in Lebanon early Friday, a day after President Trump announced a three-week extension of the cease-fire there.
Mr. Trump made the announcement after hosting a meeting at the White House between Israeli and Lebanese diplomats. Hezbollah, which did not have representatives at the talks, did not immediately comment on the announcement. Neither did Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel or President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon.
Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported Israeli airstrikes and artillery fire overnight in several towns and villages in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military said early Friday that it had struck two rocket launchers in southern Lebanon. It said one had fired rockets toward northern Israel and that the other was loaded and posed a threat to Israeli soldiers.
Under the terms of the cease-fire, Israel has the right to act in self-defense but not to carry out offensive operations against Lebanese targets.
A durable peace would hinge on Lebanon’s ability to rein in Hezbollah, which exerts de facto control over large areas of the country’s south.
Stopping the fighting in Lebanon is considered crucial to advancing any peace agreement between Iran and the United States and Israel. Since the 10-day cease-fire took effect in Lebanon this month, the number of Israeli airstrikes and Hezbollah attacks has fallen dramatically.
In the days after a separate cease-fire paused the Iran war, hostilities between the United States and Iran have shifted to the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides have in recent days seized ships they said were violating their respective restrictions on using the waterway, normally a busy conduit for global oil and gas supplies.
There has been little public indication that either Washington or Tehran wants to restart peace talks. Mr. Trump on Thursday ordered the U.S. Navy to “shoot and kill any boat” that is laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
Pentagon briefing: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are scheduled to hold a news conference on the military campaign against Iran at 8 a.m. Eastern time on Friday.
High price tag: White House officials have refused to estimate the cost of the Iran war so far, but two independent groups say the expense has been staggering: between $28 billion and $35 billion, or just under $1 billion a day.
Reporting from Washington
Since the Iran war began in late February, the United States has burned through around 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China, close to the total number remaining in the U.S. stockpile. The military has fired off more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly 10 times the number it currently buys each year.
The Pentagon used more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war, at more than $4 million a pop, and more than 1,000 Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles, leaving inventories worrisomely low, according to internal Defense Department estimates and congressional officials.
The Iran war has significantly drained much of the U.S. military’s global supply of munitions, and forced the Pentagon to rush bombs, missiles and other hardware to the Middle East from commands in Asia and Europe. The drawdowns have left these regional commands less ready to confront potential adversaries like Russia and China, and it has forced the United States to find ways to scale up production to address the depletions, Trump administration and congressional officials say.
The conflict has also underscored the Pentagon’s overreliance on excessively expensive missiles and munitions, especially air-defense interceptors, as well as concerns about whether the defense industry can develop cheaper arms, especially attack drones, far more quickly.
The Defense Department has not disclosed how many munitions it used in 38 days of war before a cease-fire took effect two weeks ago. The Pentagon says it hit more than 13,000 targets, but officials say that figure masks the vast number of bombs and missiles it used because warplanes, attack planes and artillery typically strike large targets multiple times.
White House officials have refused to estimate the cost of the conflict so far, but two independent groups say the expense is staggering: between $28 billion and $35 billion, or just under $1 billion a day.
In the first two days alone, defense officials have told lawmakers, the military used $5.6 billion of munitions.
To restore the U.S. global stockpile to its previous size, the United States will have to make tough choices about where to maintain its military strength in the meantime. “At current production rates, reconstituting what we have expended could take years,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said this week.
“The United States has many munitions with adequate inventories, but some critical ground-attack and missile-defense munitions were short before the war and are even shorter now,” said Mark F. Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which recently published a study estimating the status of key munitions.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that “the entire premise of this story is false.” She added: “The United States of America has the most powerful military in the world, fully loaded with more than enough weapons and munitions, in stockpiles here at home and all around the globe, to effectively defend the homeland and achieve any military operation directed by the commander in chief.”
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, declined to comment on “any specific theater requirements or detail our global resource capabilities,” citing operational security.
Some Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the chairman of the subcommittee that funds the Pentagon, have pressed for an increase in spending on munitions production over several administrations. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has made that goal a top priority during his tenure.
Making things more perilous for the Pentagon, officials say, is that the Defense Department is waiting for Congress to approve additional funding before it can pay weapons manufacturers to replenish the depleted American supply. In January, the administration announced that it had secured seven-year agreements with major defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, to increase production capacity for defense systems like missile interceptors.
The agreement called for quadrupling the production of precision-guided munitions and THAAD missile interceptors. Defense manufacturers, for their part, agreed to fund factory expansions in exchange for secured long-term orders.
But officials said there had been no movement to actually begin the expanded production, because the Pentagon was scrambling to find the funding.
In the meantime, the military is using its existing weapons supplies at steep rates to meet Central Command’s immediate needs in the Iran war. Certain munition levels are shrinking faster than others.
The Pentagon, for example, has committed most of its inventory of stealthy, long-range cruise missiles to the fight against Iran. These missiles, called Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range, or JASSM-ER, are launched from fighters and bombers and have a range of more than 600 miles. They are designed to penetrate hard targets outside the range of enemy air defenses.
Since the war started, the military has used about 1,100 JASSM-ER missiles, which cost roughly $1.1 million apiece, leaving roughly 1,500 in the military’s inventories, according to internal Pentagon estimates, a U.S. military official and a congressional official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential combat assessments.
Tomahawks, which cost about $3.6 million each, are long-range cruise missiles that have been widely used for U.S. warfighting since the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. They remain a key munition for potential future wars, including one in Asia.
“While sufficient munitions exist to wage this war, high expenditure of Tomahawks and other missiles in Operation Epic Fury creates risks for the United States in other theaters — particularly the Western Pacific,” concluded a C.S.I.S. study, which estimated the remaining Tomahawk stockpiles to be around 3,000 missiles.
Patriot interceptor missiles can cost nearly $4 million each. The United States produced about 600 of them in all of 2025. More than 1,200 have been used in the war so far, according to internal Pentagon estimates and congressional officials.
Overall, the cost of the war so far is between $25 billion and $35 billion, according to a study this month by the American Enterprise Institute compiled by Elaine McCusker, a senior Pentagon official during the first Trump administration. Mr. Cancian of C.S.I.S. said in an email that he and his analysts put the cost of the conflict so far at about $28 billion.
The military is also incurring unexpected costs from damaged or destroyed aircraft. In the Navy SEAL Team 6 operation to rescue a downed Air Force officer in Iran, the military had to destroy two MC-130 cargo planes and at least three MH-6 helicopters inside them after the planes’ nose gear got stuck in the wet sand of a makeshift airstrip. Mr. Cancian estimated the total cost of the lost aircraft at about $275 million. Three replacement planes eventually flew the airman and the commandos to safety, but the Pentagon did not want sensitive technology from the aircraft to fall into Iranian hands.
All regional military commanders are feeling the strain of shrinking munitions stocks.
In Europe, the war has led to depletions in weapons systems critical for defending the eastern flank of NATO from Russian aggression, according to Pentagon information reviewed by The New York Times.
A problem described as serious was the loss of surveillance and attack drones. The demands of the Iran war have also curtailed exercises and training. According to military officials, this hurts the ability to mount offensive operations in Europe, as well as deterrence of potential Russian attacks.
Asked about the shortcomings, Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, the head of U.S. European Command, said in a statement, “Our warfighters are proud of the support we’ve provided to USCENTCOM in support of President Trump’s historic operations against Iran.”
But the biggest impact has been on troops in Asia.
Before the war with Iran started, American military commanders redirected the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group from the South China Sea to the Middle East. Since then, two Marine Expeditionary Units, each with about 2,200 Marines, have been sent to the Middle East from the Pacific. The Pentagon has also moved sophisticated air defenses from Asia to bolster protection against Iran’s drones and rockets.
The redirected weapons include Patriot missiles and interceptors from the THAAD system in South Korea — the only Asian ally hosting the advanced missile defense system, deployed by the Pentagon to counter North Korea’s growing missile threat. Now, for the first time, the system’s interceptors are being moved away, according to American officials.
U.S. readiness in the Pacific was hurt earlier by the Pentagon’s deployment of warships and aircraft to the Middle East after the Israel-Gaza war began in October 2023 and after Houthi militia forces in Yemen started attacking ships in the Red Sea to support the Palestinians, the officials say.
The monthlong bombing campaign against the Houthis last year — an operation the Pentagon called Rough Rider — was much larger than the Trump administration initially disclosed at the time. The Pentagon used up about $200 million of munitions in the first three weeks alone, U.S. officials said. The costs of the overall operation far exceeded $1 billion when operational and personnel expenses were taken into account, the officials added.
The American ships and aircraft, as well as the service members working on them, are being pushed at what the military calls a high operating tempo. Even basic equipment maintenance becomes an issue under those grinding conditions.
A spokeswoman for Adm. Samuel J. Paparo Jr., the head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command, declined to comment on the arms diverted from Asia to the Middle East.
Admiral Paparo largely sidestepped the issue of stockpile shortages during a Senate hearing on Tuesday, acknowledging only that “there are finite limits to the magazine.”
Michael Schwirtz and Adam Goldman contributed reporting from London. John Ismay, Helene Cooper and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from Washington.
After President Trump announced a three-week extension to a cease-fire between Lebanon and Israel, the Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors, who were in the Oval Office, thanked him.
Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, said that thanks to Trump’s leadership, “the possibility of degrading Hezbollah and liberating Lebanon from their occupation is real.” He said he hoped Israel and Lebanon could “formalize peace in the near future.”
The Lebanese ambassador, Nada Hamadeh Moawad, thanked Trump for “presiding over this historic moment.” She said: “I think with your help, your support, we can make Lebanon great again.”
Asked about a potential durable peace deal between Lebanon and Israel, Trump said that “I think there’s a great chance. They are friends about the same things and they are enemies on the same things.” Lebanon and Israel have been periodically at war since 1978, in large part over the issue of Palestine. The Lebanese government does not control Hezbollah, the Iran-backed force fighting Israel.
President Trump said that the cease-fire between Lebanon and Israel would be extended by three weeks, after a meeting with diplomats from Lebanon and Israel in the Oval Office. He added that he looked forward “in the near future to hosting the Prime Minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu, and the President of Lebanon, Joseph Aoun.” No such meeting has been scheduled.
Luke Broadwater and David E. Sanger are White House correspondents. They reported from Washington.
In recent weeks, President Trump has been talking about a substance he says is key to ending the United States’ war against Iran: “nuclear dust.”
In the president’s telling, Iran’s nuclear program was so badly damaged by U.S. bombs last year that all that remains under the rubble is a sort of powdery aftermath.
The phrase “nuclear dust” seemed designed to diminish the importance of what Mr. Trump is actually talking about — Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium, which is stored in canisters about the size of large scuba tanks.
The material is not, in fact, “dust.” It is typically a gas when stored inside the canisters, though it becomes a solid at room temperature. It is a volatile and highly toxic substance if it comes into contact with moisture and, if mishandled, can trigger a nuclear reaction.
Mr. Trump’s phrase oversimplifies the complex tasks of enriching uranium, to say nothing of negotiating an end to the war. It’s also a phrase nuclear experts say they’ve never heard before.
“I just interpreted it as Trump’s kind of colorful way of talking,” said Matthew Kroenig, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
Here’s a closer look at what Mr. Trump means when he talks about “nuclear dust,” and why it’s important for an end to the conflict.
Mr. Trump is referring chiefly to the uranium Iran has enriched to 60 percent, near the 90 percent purity normally used to make a bomb. There is no use for fuel enriched to that level for, say, producing nuclear power. So it is a warning sign to the international community that Iran could quickly convert the fuel to bomb-grade, even though there would still be many steps to then build a nuclear bomb.
The United States struck three key nuclear sites in June, including a complex outside Isfahan, where much of the near-bomb grade material was believed to be stored.
“It’s not yet bomb-grade, but it’s on the way there, and it was being stored on the nuclear facility at Isfahan,” Mr. Kroenig said. “And so when Isfahan was bombed, that material was presumably entombed there.”
American intelligence officials believe that the Iranians dug down to gain access to the material, though there is no evidence any of it has been moved.
Uranium contains a rare radioactive isotope, called U-235, that can be used to power nuclear reactors at low enrichment levels and to fuel nuclear bombs at much higher levels. The goal of uranium enrichment is to raise the percentage levels of U-235, which is often done by running it through gas centrifuges, machines that spin at supersonic speeds to increase the purity of the fuel.
Mr. Trump has said that Iran had agreed to turn over its nuclear materials to the United States, though Tehran has denied that claim.
“The U.S.A. will get all nuclear dust,” Mr. Trump told a crowd in Arizona last week. “You know what the nuclear dust is? That was that white powdery substance created by our B-2 bombers.”
Iranian enrichment levels have been rising since Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Obama-era nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., saying the agreement wasn’t tough enough.
Mr. Trump then imposed several rounds of American sanctions on Iran. In response, Tehran repeatedly moved beyond the strict limits that the agreement had placed on its uranium enrichment, and began to resume production of nuclear material.
“They were enriching at very low levels before Trump administration withdrew the United States from the J.C.P.O.A.,” said Justin Logan, the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank. “So what he is calling ‘nuclear dust’ did not exist inside Iran after the signing or the first several months of the J.C.P.O.A.”
Mr. Trump acknowledges removing Iran’s enriched uranium would be difficult. On Truth Social, he said this week that “digging it out will be a long and difficult process.”
It could be almost impossible without Iranian agreement.
“This would be a mission that would take a lot of time, and there would be a lot of nerds that aren’t good at killing people that would need to be involved here,” Mr. Logan said. “So the idea of doing this while we have our swords drawn strikes me as crazy.”
He said it would be similarly difficult for the Iranians to extract the material during the war.
“Trump is correct to say that we have eyes over the target pretty much all the time, and the Iranians couldn’t just swoop in the middle of the night and spirit it out; it’s an extremely volatile substance,” he said. “We don’t know the conditions of the underground storage. Those tanks in which it has been stored might not be in great condition. It’s going to require a lot of nerds on the ground. And that’s true for the Iranians as much as it is true for us.”
President Trump, who once threatened to eliminate the entire civilization of Iran, did not escalate his rhetoric in the Oval Office on Thursday. Asked by a reporter directly, the president ruled out using a nuclear bomb.
“Why would I use a nuclear weapon when we’ve totally, in a very conventional way decimated them without it,” Trump said. “No, I wouldn’t use it. A nuclear weapon should never be allowed to be used by anybody.”
Israeli Strikes Kill Journalist in Southern Lebanon
Amal Khalil, a reporter for the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, had gained renown for her intrepidity and her resolve over two decades of covering round after round of war between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia.
On Wednesday, she was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the village of Tayri in southern Lebanon. She remained trapped under rubble for hours before emergency medics recovered her body, according to the Lebanese Civil Defense.
At her family’s home on Thursday, mourners gathered to pay their respects and vent their anger at what they saw not just as the blatant targeting of civilians but a violation of Israel’s and Hezbollah’s temporary cease-fire.
“You couldn’t ask Amal to be careful,” her brother Ali Khalil said as he received condolences. “This is the only time I know Amal’s address: she’s in the grave. She used to move nonstop from one village to another in the south,” he said. “Now I know where my sister is.”
Zeinab Faraj, a photojournalist and colleague of Ms. Khalil’s, was rescued from the house.
The Lebanese Ministry of Public Health said the Israeli military had targeted the journalists in Tayri, where they took shelter in a nearby house after an airstrike destroyed a vehicle in front of the car they were traveling in. About an hour and a half later, a second strike hit the house they were hiding in, according to a statement by Al-Akhbar.
Amid the 10-day truce between Israel and Lebanon, Israel has continued strikes against what it says are Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, citing its right to self-defense. The Israeli military denied in a statement that it had prevented rescuers from reaching the injured journalists, and said the incident was under investigation.
A spokeswoman for the Israeli military said Israeli forces had spotted two vehicles emerging from a military building used by Hezbollah. The military observed the vehicles cross what the spokeswoman called the forward defense line, determining the move to be a violation of the truce agreement.
Lebanon’s prime minister, as well as the Committee to Protect Journalists and Ms. Khalil’s employer disputed Israel’s justifications, and condemned what they said was the deliberate targeting of journalists and humanitarian workers.
“As with every act of aggression, wearing a press vest did not protect those who wore it from the treachery of the Israeli enemy,” Al-Akhbar said in a statement. “Instead, it has become a danger to journalists’ lives, as part of a systematic Israeli policy aimed at silencing anyone who seeks to expose the crimes and practices of the occupation.”
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Baysariyeh, Lebanon.
Read the full story at nyt News.
European stocks lower as ceasefire optimism fades; SAP surges 6% on profit beat
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/24/2026, 1:33:57 PM
European stock markets traded lower on Friday morning, as uncertainty over U.S.-Iran peace talks weighed on investor sentiment.
The pan-European Stoxx 600 was down 0.5% shortly after 8:35 a.m. in London (3:35 a.m. ET), with most regional sectors and all major bourses in negative territory. Oil and gas led the gains, rising 1.2% in early dealmaking as energy prices ticked higher. Mining stocks saw the largest losses, sliding almost 1.7%.
Shares in SAP surged about 6.4% in morning trade after the German multinational enterprise software giant announced a rise in operating profits of almost 17%, and a 19% jump in cloud revenues, in its latest quarterly earnings.
SAP CEO Christian Klein told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" on Friday that the company is "uniquely positioned to win in business AI" adding that it will "double down and reinvest" more money into AI innovation.
Renault shares, meanwhile, were 2.2% lower after the French carmaker said its first-quarter sales were 3.3% lower than the same three-month period last year. Its group revenues rose 7.3% in the period, however, reaching 12.5 billion euros ($14.6 billion).
Investor attention remains focused on developments in the Middle East. On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters, "don't rush me," when questioned on a long-term deal with Iran. He also said he won't put a "timetable" on when the war will end.
Overnight, it was reported that U.S. forces had boarded and searched another tanker thought to be carrying Iranian oil through the Indian Ocean.
Oil prices edged higher on Friday morning, with global benchmark Brent crude futures adding 0.5% to reach $105.65 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures were marginally higher at $96.12, a 0.4% increase.
Back in Europe, investors will be monitoring another flurry of corporate earnings, with Eni, Orange, and Volvo among the firms set to update shareholders on their finances.
U.K. retail sales increased 0.7% in March, according to new Office for National Statistics data, outweighing the 0.1% forecast by economists.
Other economic data releases on Friday include French consumer confidence figures, and a German Ifo Business Climate update.
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