Top Stories; Iran War Live Updates: Israel Strikes Hezbollah as Lebanon Impasse Threatens Cease-Fire
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Iran War Live Updates: Israel Strikes Hezbollah as Lebanon Impasse Threatens Cease-Fire
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/10/2026, 2:01:34 PM
Tehran12:06 p.m. April 10
The Israeli military said early Friday that it was striking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, the latest attacks in a campaign that is straining diplomacy three days into a shaky cease-fire between the United States and Iran.
The Israeli strikes against the Iran-backed militia have exposed divergences between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump, who appears eager to strike a deal with Iran to end the war. The Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, said delegates from the country would not attend peace talks in Pakistan scheduled to begin on Saturday if the cease-fire was not extended to Lebanon.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump said he had asked Mr. Netanyahu to scale back Israel’s operations in Lebanon. The Israeli leader later said his country would start talks with the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah. But, hours later, he vowed to continue strikes on the group.
“There is no cease-fire in Lebanon,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
Israeli airstrikes have killed hundreds of people in Lebanon since the cease-fire took effect, according to the Lebanese authorities. European leaders have urged Israel to stop the attacks, warning that they threaten to derail efforts to end the war. They have also demanded that Lebanon be included in the cease-fire.
But any talks between Israel and Lebanon would face enormous hurdles, in part because the Lebanese government has no direct control over Hezbollah, which has resisted disarming. Mr. Netanyahu said on Thursday that Israeli operations will not stop until Hezbollah is disarmed. A senior Hezbollah official dismissed the possibility of talks between Israel and Lebanon, saying that the Lebanese government did not speak for the group.
The uncertainty over Lebanon cast a shadow over preparations for U.S.-Iran talks that are scheduled to begin in Islamabad on Saturday. Vice President JD Vance is expected to arrive in the Pakistani capital on Friday to lead the U.S. delegation.
A key priority for Mr. Vance will be ensuring the full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping passage for oil and gas that Iran has in effect blockaded since the war started. While the cease-fire announcement led to a drop in global oil prices, tankers have not restarted journeys through the strait over fears of attacks.
Saeed Khatibzadeh, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, said on Thursday that the strait was open to everyone but that ships must coordinate with the Iranian military because of “technical restrictions,” including mines.
Mr. Trump expressed displeasure with the situation in the strait in a social media post late Thursday.
“Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz,” he wrote. “That is not the agreement we have!”
Here’s what else we’re covering:
Global economic outlook: The International Monetary Fund will downgrade its global growth outlook because of the war, its managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, said on Thursday. Even under the most optimistic outcome, she said, where the temporary truce holds, there will be economic fallout because of “infrastructure damage, supply disruptions, losses of confidence, and other scarring effects.”
Death tolls: The Human Rights Activists News Agency said at least 1,701 civilians, including 254 children, had been killed in Iran as of Wednesday. Lebanon’s health ministry on Monday said that more than 1,500 people had been killed in the latest fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. In attacks blamed on Iran, at least 32 people have been killed in Gulf nations. In Israel, at least 20 people had been killed as of Monday. The American death toll stands at 13 service members.
South Korea will send a special envoy to Iran to discuss the safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, the foreign ministry in Seoul said on Friday. The blockade of the strait has choked off around 70 percent of the country’s crude oil imports and stranded 26 South Korean ships.
President Volodymyr Zelensky also said in his social media posts on Friday that Ukraine would receive assistance in various ways in exchange for providing defense expertise to Middle Eastern countries. These include crude oil and diesel supplies, interceptor missiles and financial arrangements, he said, without elaborating.
Ukrainian military experts shot down Iranian drones over several countries in the Middle East during the war, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on social media on Friday. Ukraine sent military advisors, including drone warfare experts, to Persian Gulf countries to help improve their air defenses. This was the first public acknowledgement from Ukraine that its personnel were actively involved in shooting down drones from Iran.
Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, is on lockdown for the U.S.-Iran talks. The authorities have blocked roads with shipping containers and barbed wire, and deployed security forces across the city. The area in a two-mile radius around the Serena Hotel, which is expected to host the delegations is sealed off. Even the hiking trails on the lush hills overlooking Islamabad have been closed to the public.
Pakistani officials have been tight-lipped about the talks, citing security concerns and the need to let Iranian and U.S. officials drive the negotiations. Less than 24 hours before the talks are expected to begin, we know very little about how they are going to unfold.
For the last several weeks, sailing a ship through the Strait of Hormuz was perilous, given the risk of Iranian attacks, whether by missiles or mines. Now that the United States and Iran have put the war on pause, the voyage may be less dangerous. But it is no less challenging politically or diplomatically.
Two days into the fragile cease-fire, the strait has become Iran’s biggest chip in a high-stakes geopolitical contest with President Trump.
Rather than throwing open the waterway to oil tankers and container ships, as the Trump administration had promised, shipping analysts said Iran was keeping a chokehold on it. And Iran is giving priority to a trickle of vessels from countries that either trade directly with it or are not viewed as hostile to the Iranian government.
This has put the dozens of countries that use the strait in a devilish position, having to navigate between Iran and the United States like modern-day versions of Scylla and Charybdis, the monsters of Greek mythology who threatened mariners with destruction in the treacherous Strait of Messina.
“The Iranians are willing to negotiate with certain countries to secure voyages, but only on a case-by-case basis,” said Bridget Diakun, a senior risk and compliance analyst at Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a London-based maritime data and intelligence company. “The Trump administration is forcing its allies to negotiate with Iran because there is no other option.”
That could change, of course, if the United States applies enough pressure on Iran to ease passage in the strait. But for now, at least, the Iranians are still exploiting their ability to disrupt global trade and energy flows — based on their interests.
It was no coincidence, shipping analysts said, that the first Western European-owned vessel to transit the strait since Iran imposed restrictions belonged to a French shipping company, CMA CGM, and that its safe passage last week came the day after President Emmanuel Macron of France lashed out at Mr. Trump for his management of the war and for his frequent criticism of the NATO alliance.
“France has positioned itself as not aligned with the U.S. on the war, and so not hostile to Iran,” said Martin Kelly, the head of advisory at EOS Risk Group, a consulting firm. “It was probably a message to the rest of Europe.”
A spokeswoman for CMA CGM declined to comment on how it struck a deal with Iran. French officials said they were in touch with the company but have not said whether the government played a role in securing the ship’s passage.
Other countries that have won passage for ships, like Turkey, Pakistan and India, either trade with Iran or have taken a neutral position on the war. Pakistan brokered the negotiations that resulted in the cease-fire, and it will play host to Vice President JD Vance and an Iranian delegation in Islamabad on Saturday, where the two sides will try to work out a permanent settlement.
In the meantime, Iran is keeping a chokehold on the strait. On Wednesday, only five cargo ships passed through, none of which were carrying oil or gas. Iranian media said Iran halted tankers to protest Israel’s strikes on Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, in Lebanon. Iran, Israel and the United States have argued over whether the cease-fire agreement includes Lebanon.
On Thursday, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Saeed Khatibzadeh, said in an interview with ITV News that the strait was open to all but that there were still mines in the water and that ships wanting passage needed to coordinate with the Iranian military. That could further spook shipping companies, even if they doubted the veracity of Iran’s claims.
It also raised the pressure on them to use only a route that passes closer to Iranian territory, known as the Larak detour, which allows the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to vet the ships and potentially collect fees for passage.
In its negotiation with the Trump administration, Iran wants to make that arrangement permanent. Iranian officials said they plan to charge ships $2 million per passage and use the money, after giving neighboring Oman a cut, to rebuild infrastructure destroyed by American and Israeli airstrikes.
Mr. Trump responded by floating the possibility that the United States would jointly control the strait with Iran and split the proceeds with it. The toll-collecting concept was quickly rejected by allies like Britain, whose foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, said on Thursday, “freedom of navigation means navigation must be free.”
Those remarks could rankle Mr. Trump, who has already lashed out at Britain for its lack of support for the campaign. In fact, European countries are likely to have the thorniest challenge in navigating the politics of using the strait. Mr. Trump has castigated NATO allies more broadly for their unwillingness to forcibly reopen the strait, and said at various times that Iran’s control of the strait is a problem for Europe, not the United States.
European countries, which rely more heavily than the United States on oil and gas coming from the Persian Gulf, are assembling a 35-member coalition to do that, but only after the conflict is settled.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar are also likely to balk at a toll, given their deep reliance on oil and natural gas exports. But even if it is a far-fetched idea, analysts said it could give Iran leverage in talks with the United States that will cover other difficult issues, like its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
While the world waits for a definitive end to the conflict, countries are likely to keep trying to cut their own deals with Iran.
Diplomats from Turkey, which had 15 ships and more than 150 sailors stranded by the war, have spoken with Iranian officials about securing safe passage for the trapped vessels. They drew on Turkey’s longstanding trade and diplomatic relations with Iran, which included President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s efforts to prevent the war before the United States and Israel began bombing.
Turkey got three Turkish-owned vessels through before the cease-fire was announced, flying the flags of Panama, Belize and St. Kitts & Nevis. One, the Ocean Thunder, is carrying about one million barrels of crude oil from Iraq, which Iran said would be exempted from restrictions on transit.
“Turkey has taken a position of active neutrality,” said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the managing director of the Turkey office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “Turkey’s ability to have three of its ships pass through Hormuz is part of Iran’s appreciation,” he added. “It is basically signaling and telling others, ‘You, too, could have your ships passing if you show some effort.’”
Iran is also rewarding countries for doing business with it. India, which secured passage for eight Indian-flagged ships before the cease-fire was announced, confirmed that it had purchased its first shipment of oil from Iran in seven years. The United States temporarily lifted sanctions on Iranian oil to ease the supply shortages resulting from the closure of the strait.
Indian officials denied that Iran was receiving money in exchange for allowing Indian vessels to cross the strait. “Amid Middle East supply disruptions, Indian refiners have secured their crude oil requirements, including from Iran; and there is no payment hurdle for Iranian crude imports,” the oil ministry said on X.
Mr. Kelly of EOS Risk Group estimated there were nearly 1,000 ships waiting to enter or exit the Persian Gulf. At the current trickle, only a fraction of those will be allowed to transit before the expiration of the two-week cease-fire. And that will give Iran enormous clout in negotiating deals, he said.
“This is the most effective bargaining chip that Iran has got, and will always have,” Mr. Kelly said. “This is going to have a huge impact on global trade and the global economy.”
Ben Hubbard contributed reporting from Istanbul, Elian Peltier from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Pragati K.B. from New Delhi.
In a statement on Thursday, the State Department said that a group of U.S. diplomats had been ambushed in Baghdad on Wednesday by Iran-aligned militia groups in Iraq. No casualties were reported. The ambush, the department said, followed “hundreds” of attacks in recent weeks against U.S. citizens and diplomatic facilities — including the weeklong abduction of the American journalist Shelly Kittleson.
The department called on the Iraqi government to take immediate steps to dismantle Iran-aligned militia groups in Iraq, and criticized its “failure” so far to constrain them.
Iran’s state media announced that the former foreign minister Kamal Kharazi, who was targeted by Israel in airstrikes on April 1, was dead after more than a week of being in a coma. Mr. Kharazi headed Iran’s Foreign Policy Council, a body that sets foreign policies. He had been supervising discussions with Pakistan for potential talks between Tehran and Washington, according to three Iranian officials.
The United States delegation is set to meet with Iranian officials in Pakistan on Saturday for talks as continued strikes in the region test a tenuous cease-fire.
Pakistan brokered a two-week cease-fire between the United States and Iran on Tuesday, pulling off a diplomatic victory after more than five weeks of war tied to thousands of deaths in the Middle East.
U.S. officials are entering the talks in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, amid rival demands from Tehran and Washington over a longer-term settlement and doubts about the durability of the cease-fire that is in place now.
The Israeli military has continued to attack sites in Lebanon, where the Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah holds sway. And confusion over the status of the Strait of Hormuz, the vital oil route that Iran closed off to U.S. allies during the war, has also tested the tentative truce.
Here’s what to know about the talks this weekend.
Pakistan will host the talks between the United States and Iran and serve as a mediator.
Pakistan shares a 565-mile border and deep bonds with Iran. It has also spent the last year wooing Mr. Trump, lavishing him with praise, nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize and striking a series of business deals with the administration.
In June, Pakistan’s top military leader, Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, had a private lunch with Mr. Trump at the White House.
Vice President JD Vance will lead the U.S. delegation, which will also include Mr. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner led the last round of talks with Iranian officials in late February, when they concluded that Tehran was not open to a deal over its nuclear program. Veteran diplomats have raised concerns that Mr. Trump has sidelined skilled experts and left Middle East diplomacy in the hands of a friend and family member, who have backgrounds in real estate.
The speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, will represent his country, according to Iranian state media.
He is one of the highest-ranking officials left in Iran since Israeli strikes took out many of the country’s top leaders, including the nation’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Before he was killed at the start of the war on Feb. 28, Mr. Khamenei designated Mr. Ghalibaf as his de facto deputy to lead the Iranian armed forces during war.
Iran’s nuclear enrichment and ballistic missile programs, as well as its moves against the Strait of Hormuz, will likely be major talking points during negotiations. As of Thursday, hundreds of tankers were still waiting to return to the waterway that once transported a large portion of the world’s seaborne oil and gas.
Iranian officials are seeking a guarantee from the United States of a more permanent end to hostilities, going further than the cease-fire that U.S. mediators are offering.
Iran released the proposal on Wednesday, outlining sweeping demands that would be difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with U.S. aims.
The framework allows Iran to maintain control of the strait, requires the United States to withdraw its forces from all bases in the region and maintains Iran’s right to nuclear enrichment. It also calls for an end to Israeli attacks on Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. Israel and the United States say the current cease-fire does not apply to Lebanon.
A day earlier, Mr. Trump described the Iranian framework as “a workable basis on which to negotiate” an end to the war. But a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the demands in the 10-point plan were not in keeping with the framework Mr. Trump meant.
Many of them are likely to conflict with a 15-point proposal U.S. mediators laid out last month, which officials said addressed Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs, as well as maritime trade.
In a Truth Social post on Thursday, Mr. Trump referred to the 15 points and claimed that Iran had already agreed to many of them.
According to Iranian state media, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps denied on Thursday that Iranian forces had launched any drones or missiles since the U.S.-Iran cease-fire began, after various Gulf states reported attacks on Wednesday and Kuwait said it was fending off drones on Thursday.
The I.R.G.C. said it had made “absolutely no launches toward any country” since the temporary truce was announced late Tuesday, adding that any reported attacks were the work of “the Zionist enemy or the United States.” It also said Iran publicly announces any operations it carries out.
President Trump again denounced Iran for not fully reopening the Strait of Hormuz to shipping traffic, accusing it of being a violation of the cease-fire agreement. But it is unclear if the president would take any action in response.
“Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump said in a social media post. “That is not the agreement we have!”
Only a handful of vessels have crossed the strait since the truce began. Iran’s foreign minister had said in a statement that safe passage through the strait would be possible if coordinated with Iran’s military and with consideration of “technical limitations.” But analysts have noted that this was Iran’s position before the cease-fire.
Reporting from Washington
Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, described his tense meeting with President Trump this week as a “conversation” that “was really between friends.”
Mr. Trump, in a social media post on Thursday, put it slightly differently: “our own, very disappointing, NATO” does not understand “anything unless they have pressure placed upon them!!!”
Even as it has violently upended the Middle East and put intense strains on the global economy, the war in Iran has deepened the gulf between Mr. Trump and America’s NATO allies. That is after those countries spent more than a year buffeted by the president’s threats, begun in his first term, to abandon the alliance.
Mr. Trump is training his anger at NATO as his cease-fire with Iran hangs in the balance and even some of his supporters question whether the United States really achieved its objectives. He is airing his discontent over his inability to take over Greenland, despite behind-the-scenes talks over the Danish island that the White House says are going well. And he is forcing European leaders yet again to try to keep him from abandoning them, even as their countries struggle to shoulder the economic costs of the U.S. war with Iran.
“We have, sometimes, the political home front to take care of,” Mr. Rutte said onstage at the Ronald Reagan Institute in Washington on Thursday, in a diplomatically phrased reminder that the war was deeply unpopular in Europe. “NATO is there, of course, to protect the Europeans, but also to protect the United States.”
Mr. Rutte, a former prime minister of the Netherlands, was making the point that the U.S. military benefits from its bases in Europe and, despite the tensions, has used them as staging sites for the war on Iran. But widening cracks in the alliance show that even if negotiators succeed in making a deal in the talks that start Saturday for a more permanent end to the war, the scars are likely to be lasting.
The Iran war “has become a trans-Atlantic stress test,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany said on Thursday, after acknowledging that his country was “massively suffering” from the energy market disruptions caused by the war. “We do not want — I do not want — a split within NATO.”
Mr. Trump’s disdain for the alliance dates back decades, underpinned by his conviction that Europeans have been freeloading off the American security umbrella. His latest fury stems from U.S. allies’ refusal to embrace his decision to join Israel in assaulting Iran, with Britain and Spain setting limits on the United States’ ability to use bases on their territory.
Mr. Trump escalated his threats against NATO even as he prepared to wind down the war — and despite the fact that he did not try to build a coalition with European countries before the bombing started. He told The Telegraph last week that he may pull out of the alliance entirely. In a news conference on Monday, a day before the cease-fire, Mr. Trump volunteered that he still sought control of Greenland, the semiautonomous Danish territory in the North Atlantic.
“It all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland,” Mr. Trump said after voicing his dissatisfaction with Europe’s lack of support for the Iran war. “We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us.”
He reinforced the point Wednesday, posting on social media in all capitals that “NATO wasn’t there when we needed them” and that Greenland was a “big, poorly run, piece of ice!!!”
Mr. Trump’s pivot back to Greenland was striking given that he said in January that he and Mr. Rutte had formed a “great” framework for a future deal over the island. Three-way talks between officials from Greenland, Denmark and the United States have continued since. There is no indication that those talks would grant control of Greenland to the United States, but a White House official said the administration was optimistic about the course of the talks.
In years past, many of Mr. Trump’s allies in Washington tried to rein in his attacks on NATO, seeking to remind him of the power that the United States gains from being able to base troops and warplanes in Europe. But in recent weeks, many of the war’s supporters in the United States have joined Mr. Trump in piling on against NATO, especially given the president’s frustration over Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Sean Hannity, the Fox News host close to the president, said on his show Wednesday night that Europe was “a dying continent” and mused that “I’m not sure it’s worth going forward with NATO as we go on.”
Jack Keane, a retired general whom Mr. Trump awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2020, told Mr. Hannity that he did not think the president would pull out of NATO because “there is still value” in the alliance, but he predicted there would be consequences.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t decide to move some of our troops out of Western European countries and move them into Eastern Europe countries,” General Keane said. “I think we’ll likely do something.”
The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that Mr. Trump was considering moving U.S. troops stationed in Europe from countries seen as unhelpful in the war effort to ones seen as supportive, like Poland and Romania. The White House did not comment on the report, but a senior U.S. military official in Europe said that options were being reviewed.
Mr. Trump has threatened NATO many times, only to largely preserve the status quo. In the president’s latest outburst, some analysts also see a familiar inclination to attack a weaker party, especially given Mr. Trump’s inability to compel Iran to surrender after five weeks of bombardment.
“Beating up on Europe and NATO has really no domestic cost,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official who is the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s quite typical for Trump: When things are going wrong, he finds the weakest person in the room and blames them.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin.
The Israeli military said that it had bombed 10 rocket launchers in Lebanon late Thursday and early Friday. The launchers had fired rockets toward northern Israel earlier in the evening, the military said.
Reporting from Washington
Weeks of harmony between President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel as they waged war against Iran is coming under strain as Mr. Trump’s search for a peace deal exposes divergences between their respective long-term goals.
Their differences may force Mr. Netanyahu to accept compromises on his ambitions to crush Hezbollah in Lebanon and bring down Iran’s battered clerical leadership in the name of preserving relations with Mr. Trump, who appears eager to strike a deal with Tehran.
Mr. Trump said on Thursday that he had asked Mr. Netanyahu to scale back Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon, which threatened the two-week truce only a day after it took effect.
Mr. Netanyahu cares far more about the presence of Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon than about the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran militarized in response to the war, while Mr. Trump’s overriding priority appears to be allowing oil to pass through the waterway.
Mr. Netanyahu sees Iran’s regime as vulnerable and would prefer not to let up military or economic pressure on Tehran. Mr. Trump appears eager to conclude a war that has spiked gas prices, troubled his supporters and threatened his political standing.
Vice President JD Vance is set to lead a U.S. delegation to Islamabad this weekend for talks with Iranian officials, who hope to win relief from U.S. economic sanctions.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, singled out Mr. Netanyahu in a social media video message depicting Mr. Trump’s cease-fire with Iran as a farce. Israel’s continued attacks on Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon, which drew Iranian threats to negate the cease-fire deal, showed that Mr. Netanyahu “continues to be the outsourced leader of American foreign policy,” Mr. Warner said.
But Mr. Trump asserted himself in a Wednesday phone call with Mr. Netanyahu, he told NBC News on Thursday, in which he pressed the Israeli leader not to endanger his diplomacy with Iran.
“I spoke with Bibi and he’s going to low-key it” in Lebanon, Mr. Trump said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname.
By Thursday afternoon, Mr. Netanyahu had announced that Israel would begin direct negotiations with Lebanon over its goal of disarming Hezbollah, and a U.S. official said the State Department would host a meeting to discuss the matter in Washington next week.
It is unclear whether that will be enough to satisfy Iranian officials. Mr. Netanyahu said that his military was “continuing to strike Hezbollah with full force,” and Israeli officials accuse Hezbollah of violating the cease-fire with cross-border rocket barrages.
Natan Sachs, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said that Mr. Netanyahu’s goal was to deflect pressure from the United States without giving up on his military goals in Lebanon. But Mr. Sachs said there were limits to how much Mr. Netanyahu is willing to test Mr. Trump’s patience. The American president is very popular in Israel, making Mr. Netanyahu’s partnership with Mr. Trump his chief political asset at home as Israel prepares for national elections this year.
“Nothing looms larger in his mind than Trump,” Mr. Sachs said of Mr. Netanyahu. Whereas Mr. Netanyahu paid little price at home for brushing off demands from President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was not popular among Israelis, the dynamic has flipped, particularly among Mr. Netanyahu’s most conservative supporters.
“‘Trump asked me to do this’ is a valid excuse with his right flank,” Mr. Sachs said.
Unwilling to split openly with Mr. Trump, Mr. Netanyahu will likely make a vigorous private case to the U.S. president for hard bargaining — and a return to war if necessary — with Tehran.
Even if Mr. Trump strikes a deal that the Israeli leader views as too conciliatory, Mr. Sachs added, Mr. Netanyahu might bide his time and, after attention has drifted from the conflict, come to Mr. Trump with new intelligence about Iranian malfeasance or other arguments for renewed action.
It remains unclear how the fighting in Lebanon became subject to different interpretations.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan, whose country mediated the deal, said Tuesday on social media that the United States and Iran, “along with their allies,” had agreed to an immediate cease-fire “everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere.”
But Israel and the United States both insisted that was not the case. Mr. Vance on Wednesday chalked it up to a “reasonable misunderstanding.”
Hezbollah has been a mortal enemy of Israel for more than 40 years, since its creation, with help from Iran in response to Israel’s 1982 occupation of southern Lebanon.
Israel routinely clashed with the group but until recently had not mounted an all-out campaign to destroy it. The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel changed Mr. Netanyahu’s strategic calculus, and the Israeli leader now considers Hezbollah’s elimination an urgent priority. For Mr. Trump, by contrast, Lebanon is “a tertiary priority at best,” Mr. Sachs said.
More differences may emerge with Mr. Netanyahu as Mr. Trump negotiates a potential deal with Iran in the coming weeks. Some Iranian capabilities, such as Tehran’s medium-range ballistic missiles and its support for Hezbollah, Hamas and other proxy groups pose a greater threat to Israel than to the United States.
But every demand Mr. Trump makes of Iran will require something more in return. It is unclear how much he is willing to give up to protect Israeli interests as opposed to purely American ones — above all shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
In exchange for allowing vessels to pass freely through the vital strait, Iran is demanding that Mr. Trump lift the crushing sanctions the United States has imposed on its economy over many years. Yet Mr. Netanyahu has long called for “maximum pressure” on the country, to starve its government of funding for Hamas and Hezbollah and possibly even to cause its clerical regime to fall.
In an address to his people after the announcement of Tuesday’s cease-fire, Mr. Netanyahu said he fully supported Mr. Trump, but also made clear that he considered business in Iran to be unfinished.
Israel still “has more goals to complete” in Iran, he said. “We will achieve them,” he added, “either through agreement, or through renewed fighting.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Thursday that he had ordered his government to start direct talks with Lebanon focused on disarming Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, signaling openness to diplomacy a day after the Israeli military escalated its offensive in the country.
But Mr. Netanyahu also ruled out a cease-fire in Lebanon, saying Israel was continuing to strike Hezbollah. Iranian and American officials have disagreed over whether Lebanon was part of the fragile cease-fire deal reached between their countries this week.
Lebanon has offered for weeks to hold direct talks with Israel, but Israeli officials rebuffed those overtures and demanded that their Lebanese counterparts take decisive action against Hezbollah, which last month launched attacks against Israel in solidarity with Iran.
Mr. Netanyahu also said the negotiations would center on establishing peaceful relations between Israel and Lebanon. Hezbollah, which is also a political party with significant sway in Lebanese politics, has long resisted disarmament as well as normalized relations between the two countries.
President Joseph Aoun, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, the three Lebanese heads of government, did not immediately respond to Mr. Netanyahu’s statement.
The Israeli government has nominated Yechiel Leiter, its ambassador in Washington, to represent it in negotiations with Lebanon, according to two people familiar with the decision, including an Israeli official. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.
On Wednesday, Israel carried out the biggest bombardment of Lebanon in its monthlong war against Hezbollah, which started after the militant group launched rockets and drones into Israel on March 2 in retaliation for the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader.
Israeli jets pummeled the Lebanese capital, Beirut, and other parts of the country, with many strikes hitting densely populated areas without warning. The Israeli military said it had targeted more than 100 Hezbollah command centers and military sites in the span of just 10 minutes.
Residents had no time to flee, as munitions rained down on crowded neighborhoods that some once considered safe.
After Wednesday’s wide-scale attack, Vice President JD Vance said Israel had offered to “check themselves a little bit in Lebanon because they want to make sure our negotiation is successful,” referring to the planned talks between Iran and the United States in Islamabad, Pakistan, this weekend. He did not clarify how Israel intended to exercise restraint.
On Thursday, Mr. Salam, the Lebanese prime minister, said his cabinet decided to request that security forces bring weapons in Beirut under the government’s control, a thinly veiled reference to Hezbollah’s arms. Over the past year, Mr. Salam has called to bring weapons across Lebanon under the government’s control, but Israeli officials claimed on Wednesday that Hezbollah had repositioned in areas of Beirut away from its stronghold on the city’s outskirts.
Mr. Netanyahu said Israel appreciated Mr. Salam’s statement.
Although Lebanon and Israel do not have formal relations, representatives from their governments last met in December in southern Lebanon under the auspices of a U.S.-led committee monitoring a previous cease-fire reached in 2024.
Aaron Boxerman and Euan Ward contributed reporting to this article.
Read the full story at nyt News.
TSMC posts 35% jump in revenue to new record high as AI chip demand stays strong
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/10/2026, 1:43:07 PM
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. on Friday posted another quarter of record revenue driven by demand for AI chips.
For January to March, the world's largest chipmaker reported revenue of 1.13 trillion new Taiwan dollars ($35.6 billion), exceeding analyst forecasts of 1.12 trillion new Taiwan dollars, according to LSEG's compiled estimates. That marks a 35% year-on-year increase.
For March alone, TSMC reported a 45.2% year-on-year rise in revenue to 415.2 billion new Taiwan dollars.
The chip giant is benefiting from sustained demand for advanced semiconductors from its key customers like Apple and Nvidia, even as concerns persist about supply chain disruptions from the Middle East conflict and the potential impact it will have on demand.
"We think TSMC will easily exceed its 30% annual growth target," Sravan Kundojjala, an analyst at SemiAnalysis, told CNBC by email.
"While smartphone and PC end markets took a hit due to memory shortages," the AI segment of TSMC's business "pulled the weight," Kundojjala added.
TSMC manufactures chips for everything from consumer electronics to data centers, and has been a major beneficiary of the hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into AI infrastructure.
It is one of a very small number of companies that can manufacture the most cutting-edge chips.
TSMC has also reportedly hiked prices for its most advanced chips, which is a "big factor" behind the first-quarter sales beat, Kundojjala said, adding that he is forecasting TSMC to report gross margins of 64% for the first quarter.
There is an increasing number of players designing their own chips, from hyperscalers like Google to Arm, which used to provide the blueprint for certain semiconductors, coming to market with its own central processing unit (CPU). AI firm Anthropic is also exploring designing its own chip, Reuters reported, while a long tail of startups are bringing new products to market aimed at the area of AI inferencing.
Much of the manufacturing will have to go through TSMC, or its competitors like Samsung and Intel.
TSMC releases monthly revenue figures but offers little commentary or profitability numbers. The company will report its full first-quarter earnings on April 16.
Investors will also be eying earnings from ASML next week, a company seen as a bellwether in the semiconductor space. The Dutch giant makes machines that are critical for companies like TSMC to manufacture the most advanced chips in the world.
How Iranians Feel Now
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/10/2026, 1:29:50 PM
The story of the Iran war has been a story about an erratic U.S. president. A regional conflagration. A global energy crisis. A world in disorder.
But it’s also the story of the Iranian people, many of whom feel trapped: between their own leadership, which, according to Amnesty International, killed thousands of protesters in January, and Donald Trump, who went from promising that “help is on its way” to vowing to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.”
Today, my colleague Parin Behrooz, who grew up in Iran and has helped cover the war, writes about the Iranians who lived through it.
The people at the center of the war
By Parin Behrooz
When the U.S. and Israel launched their attack on Feb. 28, some Iranians felt something akin to hope.
The country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed in the opening hours. The deaths of senior military commanders followed. For some of the millions who oppose the Islamic republic, the war felt like a possible way out of an entrenched, repressive system.
When the news of Khamenei’s death was announced, large crowds poured into the streets of Tehran and other cities to celebrate. There were mourners too, of course. But the government is broadly unpopular, and many watching from windows and balconies joined in a chant of “freedom, freedom.”
“Maybe the regime will collapse,” wrote Yassi, a Tehran businesswoman who kept a diary during the war. “Not to say I think war will bring freedom — I am not that naïve. But maybe, just maybe, the regime will crack.”
It didn’t. Instead, over six weeks, U.S.-Israeli strikes damaged schools, hospitals, bridges, rail lines, oil depots, pharmacies, steel plants and power plants. Early in the war, a missile struck an elementary school in Minab, killing 175 people, most of them children. Strikes hit Sharif University of Technology, one of the country’s most prestigious academic institutions. Golestan Palace in Tehran, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was damaged multiple times.
The death toll grew, the damage to civilian infrastructure piled up, and with that came the realization that this war was not going to end the Islamic republic and would outlast the hopes of those who’d briefly believed it could.
The fragile cease-fire has brought relief. But hope feels farther away than ever.
Understanding what Iranians have lived through these past six weeks has required working around a state-imposed information blackout. Roughly 99 percent of the country has been cut off from the internet since the first days of the war. Incoming international calls are blocked. My colleagues and I depend on brief windows of connectivity to speak to our contacts, who use unreliable VPN connections to reach us.
Many people we reached in the aftermath of Tuesday’s cease-fire announcement feared the same thing: economic ruin. “I’m worried that the economic and cultural situation of society will become worse than before,” Mohammad, a Tehran resident, told my colleagues. They all asked to be identified by only their first names or not at all, fearing reprisal from the government.
Others worried that if economic grievances, which drove many of the recent uprisings, come to a head again, there might be even less room for protest.
In the shadow of war, the government has carried out executions of people arrested in January, including one 19-year-old. A prominent human rights lawyer was detained last week.
Chants about freedom have been replaced by other sounds these days. Many Iranians told us their soundtrack most evenings during the war consisted of explosions, and regular, informal pro-regime street gatherings in Tehran and elsewhere, where government supporters waved flags, broadcast religious chants over loudspeakers and shouted slogans like “God is great, Khamenei is the leader.”
Exhaustion and powerlessness
That the war began with explicit American encouragement for Iranians to rise up and ended with U.S. threats to bomb the country back to “the Stone Ages” has not been lost on the people living through it.
“I feel as if we are not in control of our lives,” Yassi wrote in her diary, “and none of the actors in this war, not the United States, not Israel, and certainly not the Iranian regime, care about the Iranian people.”
For Iranians opposed to the government, the dominant feeling since the cease-fire announcement has been not relief but powerlessness — the exhaustion of a people who were promised transformation and received death, destruction, and yet more uncertainty.
“The hope that this regime was collapsing doesn’t exist anymore,” Yassi said last week. A man in his 20s living in Tehran who once believed in military intervention, but lost hope when he felt it got out of hand, told my colleagues that he planned to use whatever stability the cease-fire might bring to figure out how to leave the country. When he does, he added, he would never look back.
Here’s the latest on the war:
Trump’s search for a peace deal exposes divergences between his and Benjamin Netanyahu’s respective long-term goals.
The cease-fire between Iran and the U.S. has not coaxed tankers back to the Strait of Hormuz. Here’s what to know about the situation in the strait.
In Vietnam, home to one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, skyrocketing oil and fertilizer prices, driven by the war, have brought the rice industry to a near standstill. Damien Cave, our Vietnam bureau chief, examined why that signals global food supply problems and higher grocery prices to come. Watch the video.
NASA and the U.S. Navy began preparations for recovering the Artemis II astronauts and their capsule after they splash down off the coast of Southern California today. The re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere may be the most dangerous part of the mission.
Russia sent submarines to spy on undersea pipelines and telecommunication lines in the North Atlantic, Britain’s defense secretary said.
In remarks from the White House, Melania Trump said she was not a victim of Jeffrey Epstein and that she had no knowledge of the abuse of his victims.
The most clicked link in your newsletter yesterday was on the search for Bitcoin’s inventor.
Golf: The Masters got underway with the defending champion Rory McIlroy on the course. We have live updates.
Baseball: The Toronto Blue Jays complained to umpires over how long Shohei Ohtani took to get ready to pitch.
That’s how many cups of coffee are available aboard the Artemis II spacecraft, which is now speeding back to Earth after a trip around the moon. What else is on the menu? Granola with blueberries, barbecued beef brisket and macaroni and cheese, among other things. Some of the meals need to be rehydrated before they’re eaten.
Many doctors consider unresponsive patients who are in comas or vegetative states to be unable to think or feel anything, including pain. But new research shows that it might not be so simple.
Nearly one in four vegetative patients may, in fact, be “covertly conscious,” according to one study. While the patients’ brains were severely damaged, they would still light up on scans, just as healthy ones would, when the patients imagined themselves swinging a tennis racket. Read more.
For a year, I lurked — with permission — in a WhatsApp group where a popular erotica writer from northern Nigeria posted book teasers and chatted with her readers. As a window into the lives of women who otherwise would probably never speak so openly, I recommend it.
I joined because I was interested in the business model that writers like Oum Hairan, the group’s owner, had created, and how, through paywalls and private groups, they bypassed Islamic and government censorship in a very conservative part of the world.
But what I found most compelling in the end were the conversations that groups like these fostered between hundreds of devoted readers.
Sometimes the chat was raucous. There were endless jokes, in rapid-fire Hausa, about a book called “Nymphomaniac King,” which tells the story of a monarch whose sexual affliction requires him to rendezvous with at least five women every night, for over two hours each. The readers immediately volunteered to help out.
Often, it was sisterly, offering health and sex tips and advice on how to navigate marital issues, polygamy and patriarchy. When women complained about husbands who, say, turned their attentions to a second wife, readers advised them to ignore the husbands, believe in themselves and focus on making money. “Once a man realizes that you are only seeking his attention and his love, you are doomed,” one wrote.
Other times it was paranoid, going into a frenzy about the men they suspected had infiltrated the women-only group — which was how I mistakenly got thrown out.
I don’t speak Hausa, so I used online translation services and then asked the reporter I was working with on the story, Ismail Auwal — yes, a man — to check that the translations were accurate. “It’s raw,” he kept saying. “It’s very raw!”
That was Ismail’s word for how explicit the content was. But it was also a good description of what this group offered me: women’s lives, raw and unfiltered.
Bomboloni are cream-filled doughnuts, often enjoyed in Italy with morning coffee or as an afternoon snack. Once fried, the doughnuts are rolled in sugar and filled with a simple pastry cream. Fruit jam or chocolate-hazelnut spread are also common fillings.
Where are these pyramids?
I spent the week I was off in the Dolomites, in northern Italy, just across the mountains from Austria — a place that, to me, always feels quintessentially European.
The people spoke Italian and German (and English, of course). Breakfast was German (minus the coffee — that was Italian). Dinner was Italian (minus the beer — that was German). The interior design was Italian, the engineering German: Our windows were so airtight we barely needed heat.
The flags at the hotel entrance summed it up: They were Tyrolean, Italian, Austrian, German and European.
There is a lesson in this easy layering of identities: Identity isn’t zero-sum, it’s additive. It’s something I’m trying to pass on to my 100 percent German, 100 percent Welsh and 100 percent European children.
The holiday prompted me to show them one of my favorite movies: “L’auberge Espagnole,” a comedy about half a dozen young Europeans on an Erasmus student exchange program. Making generous use of national stereotypes — Germans are earnest, Brits are funny, the French are obsessed with sex — it’s a very European story of studying, working and dating across borders and bonding in diversity.
It also made me dig up some songs I hadn’t listened to since living in Paris in my 20s. Remember Manu Chao? He sings in Spanish, French, English, among other languages. “Me Gustas Tu” is one of my favorites.
P.S. One other thing: If you want to see more of my colleagues’ great reporting when you Google something, you can now set The New York Times as a preferred source. Just click here.
Parin Behrooz and Ruth Maclean were our guest writers today.
We welcome your feedback. Send us your suggestions at theworld@nytimes.com.
Katrin Bennhold is the host of The World, the flagship global newsletter of The New York Times.
Read the full story at nyt News.
For complete details, visit the original sources linked above.
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