Top Stories — Thursday, April 9, 2026
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- Iran War Live Updates: Israeli Strikes in Lebanon Threaten Shaky U.S.-Iran Cease-Fire — nyt News
- Lebanon Mourns After Israeli Barrage Kills at Least 182 People — nyt News
- Here’s the latest. — nyt News
Iran War Live Updates: Israeli Strikes in Lebanon Threaten Shaky U.S.-Iran Cease-Fire
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/9/2026, 2:03:14 PM
Beirut/Tel Aviv11:38 a.m. April 9
Pinned
The cease-fire between the United States and Iran entered its second day on Thursday despite confusion over the status of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway that Iran has effectively blockaded, and over Lebanon, where Israel continued attacks against the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah.
On Wednesday, Iran said Lebanon was included in the cease-fire and accused the United States of not upholding its end of the deal. Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said Washington had to choose between a cease-fire or continued war via Israel. Pakistan, which mediated the truce, said the deal covered Lebanon, a claim disputed by the White House.
Israel, which said that the cease-fire did not extend to Lebanon, attacked more than 100 targets there on Wednesday, and Lebanese officials said 180 people were killed and 900 were injured. Hezbollah said on Thursday that it had targeted Israel with a rocket salvo in retaliation, and that it planned to continue attacking until Israeli aggression against Lebanon ceased.
Late Wednesday, President Trump wrote on social media that the U.S. military ships, aircraft and personnel would stay near Iran until a “REAL AGREEMENT” is reached between the two countries. If not, he said, fighting would resume “bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has seen before.”
Peace talks hosted by Pakistan were scheduled to begin in Islamabad on Saturday morning, and Vice President JD Vance was expected to travel there with a group that includes Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law.
Reza Amiri Moghadam, Iran’s ambassador to Pakistan, said on social media that the Iranian delegation was expected to arrive in Islamabad on Thursday night. The post was later deleted.
The announcement of the two-week truce calmed global markets and sent the price of oil below $100. Brent crude, the international oil price standard, ended Wednesday at $94.75 per barrel, still about 30 percent higher than it was before the war. It had skyrocketed, going above $110 for a period, after the war began on Feb. 28 and Iran moved to block the Strait of Hormuz, a vital global oil and gas conduit.
Persian Gulf countries have been fending off missile and drone attacks almost daily during the war but there were no such reports on Thursday morning from the government ministries that have typically reported previous strikes in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.
Despite that apparent calm, the status of the strait was unclear.
Under the cease-fire deal, Iran said it would allow ships to pass through the strait as long as they coordinated with the Iranian military. But as of Thursday morning, no oil and gas tankers had made the crossing since the cease-fire took effect, according to data from the ship-tracking firm Kpler.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
Lebanon: Israel’s strikes in Lebanon against Hezbollah, which has mounted rocket attacks on Israel in solidarity with Iran, prompted Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to threaten a military response against “aggressors in the region” if the attacks didn’t end immediately.
What’s next: Iran publicly released what it said was the 10-point framework for talks that Mr. Trump described as “a workable basis on which to negotiate” an end to the war. A White House official said the points did not match what Mr. Trump was referring to. Read more ›
Nuclear demand: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called on Iran to turn over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, saying that Mr. Trump could still order U.S. special forces to seize the material. Read more ›
Death tolls: The Human Rights Activists News Agency said at least 1,665 civilians, including 244 children, had been killed in Iran as of Monday. 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.
Lebanon’s health minister said the death toll from the Israeli strikes on Wednesday has climbed to 203 people, and more than 1,000 others have been wounded. It was the deadliest day in the war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group, since fighting escalated last month.
France has condemned Israel’s intensifying strikes on Lebanon and said the country should be included in the cease-fire between Iran and the United States. Jean-Noël Barrot, the foreign minister, told France Inter radio that the attacks were “all the more intolerable because they undermine” that truce. “Iran must stop terrorizing Israel through Hezbollah,” Barrot said. But he added that Lebanon should not be the “scapegoat” of an Israeli government that is “frustrated because a cease-fire has been reached between the United States and Iran.”
"La destruction de l'État libanais ne détruira pas le Hezbollah, au contraire"
Jean-Noël Barrot "condamne fermement" les frappes israéliennes au Liban, qui "ne doit pas être la victime expiatoire d'un gouvernement contrarié parce qu'un cessez-le-feu a été trouvé entre les… pic.twitter.com/eAzVG3JsnH
Britain’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, has said Lebanon should be included in the Iran cease-fire and criticized Israel’s escalating attacks on Lebanon, saying that the barrage on Wednesday “was deeply damaging.” Ms. Cooper told Times Radio on Thursday that failing to include Lebanon in the truce “will destabilize the whole region,” after Israel and the United States said it was not part of the agreement.
She made the comments as Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain arrived in the United Arab Emirates as part of a visit to Gulf allies. On Wednesday, Starmer held talks with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah and discussed efforts to convene international partners to agree plans to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Downing Street said.
One major shipping company said that the situation in the Strait of Hormuz had not changed since yesterday. “Given the ongoing uncertainty and the lack of reliable security guarantees, it will only become clear in the coming days whether and how we will be able to pass through the Strait of Hormuz,” said Leon Schulz, a spokesman for Hapag-Lloyd, a German shipping group.
The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had killed the personal secretary to Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, in its attacks on parts of Beirut a day earlier. The personal secretary, Ali Yusuf Harshi, “played a central role in managing and securing” the office of Hezbollah’s leader, the military added.
Across Iran on Thursday morning, supporters of the government gathered for mourning processions to commemorate the 40th day since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the counry’s longtime supreme leader, was killed in American and Israeli airstrikes. Photos posted on state media showed large crowds walking through the streets of the capital, Tehran, and several other cities. In Shia Islam, the 40th day after a death is an important milestone in the mourning process, when people gather to commemorate the person who died.
The day after Israel unleashed a wave of devastating strikes in several parts of Beirut that killed at least 182 people, the signs of destruction are everywhere. Mangled cars, blown-out shopfronts, sidewalks caked in dust and piles of twisted rebar. Search and rescue teams are combing through the rubble from destroyed apartment buildings, and many people are believed to be under the rubble.
Lebanon began a period of national mourning on Thursday, a day after Israeli forces unleashed an intense barrage of airstrikes across the country in the deadliest day of the war with Hezbollah.
At least 182 people were killed on Wednesday and 900 others wounded in the wave of Israeli strikes across the Lebanese capital, Beirut, and in southern and eastern Lebanon, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
The bombardment — the Israeli authorities said that they had launched more than 100 airstrikes in the space of 10 minutes — was a sharp escalation in the fighting after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Lebanon would be excluded from the cease-fire with Iran.
The strikes pummeled several crowded areas of Beirut, sending plumes of black, acrid smoke billowing over the skyline and setting off a scramble to rescue those trapped under the rubble of apartment buildings.
On Wednesday evening, Haniya Faraj, 50, was outside the American University of Beirut Medical Center, searching for a relative who had been at a coffee shop near a strike in Mazraa, a neighborhood in central Beirut.
“Nine of my relatives were injured in that attack, my two uncles, their wives, my son,” she said. “I don’t know if there are more, my head is about to explode, I can’t reach all my family members.”
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
Persian Gulf countries have been fending off missile and drone attacks almost daily during the war, but there were no such reports on Thursday morning from the ministries that have typically announced them in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.
The Iranian delegation will arrive in Pakistan tonight for talks with the United States, Reza Amiri Moghadam, Iran’s ambassador in Pakistan, said on social media on Thursday. That post was later deleted from his account. The negotiations are scheduled to begin in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, on Saturday, according to Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary.
Just before midnight, President Trump wrote on social media that all U.S. military personnel and assets will stay near Iran until a “REAL AGREEMENT” is reached between the two countries.
“If for any reason it is not, which is highly unlikely, then the ‘Shootin’ Starts,’ bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before,” he wrote.
Toward the end of last month, there were more than 50,000 American troops in the Middle East, roughly 10,000 more than usual.
Hundreds of tankers are waiting to return to the Strait of Hormuz so that the waterway can once again become a conduit for a fifth of the world’s oil and gas.
But the shaky cease-fire struck between the United States and Iran has not coaxed the tankers back — and even if it holds, other obstacles have to be overcome for shipping traffic to return to normal.
Iran has kept a stranglehold on the strait throughout the war by laying mines and attacking vessels. As part of the cease-fire, Iran’s foreign minister said, the country will allow “safe passage” for ships through the strait, but he added that the vessels would have to coordinate with Iran’s armed forces and that passages would be subject to “technical limitations.”
Only four vessels traveled through the strait on Wednesday, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, down from an average of nine a day over the previous five days. And shipping analysts said there were no signs of large-scale positioning or queuing to go through the strait.
The fragility of the cease-fire — Iran said on Wednesday that Israel’s attacks on targets in Lebanon had violated the agreement — was the main reason ships were holding back, shipping industry participants said.
“It’s too unstable for anyone to commit,” said Oscar Seikaly, chief executive of NSI Insurance Group, a maritime insurance brokerage.
First, shipping analysts say, there has to be confidence that the cease-fire will hold. And then there has to be a declaration from Iran that it will not attack vessels.
“Iran must clarify that the strait is open for safe passage. Otherwise, vessels should not be expected to sail through the way they were doing prior to the war,” said Noam Raydan, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
But Iran is also demanding that it oversee and coordinate passages through the strait. The government hasn’t clearly stated what vessel operators must do to gain permission to pass through. Some shipowners have made “toll” payments to Iran. And, according to Kpler, a shipping tracking firm, most of the crossings during the war have taken a route that goes close to Iran’s coast. This suggests that Iran requires taking this route.
Iran’s official broadcaster said on Wednesday that, because of anti-ship mines in the traffic zones, vessels must coordinate with the Iranian Navy and use designated routes to cross the waterway.
The governments of India, Pakistan and Thailand have worked with Iran to ensure safe passage of vessels.
In a joint statement on Wednesday, the leaders of seven European nations, Canada, the European Commission and the European Council said their governments “will contribute to ensuring freedom of navigation” in the strait.
President Trump suggested on Wednesday that the United States might jointly control the strait with Iran.
“The United States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz,” Mr. Trump said in a social media post. “There will be lots of positive action! Big money will be made.”
ABC News reported on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had told one of its reporters that the United States could operate shipping in the strait “as a joint venture” with Iran.
Analysts say Iran can continue to act as a gatekeeper if the number of vessels going through the strait remains relatively small. But it would not be able to manage the more than 100 ships a day that passed through the strait before the war.
“Blanket passage arrangements are unlikely to be implementable by Iran, due to capacity constraints around vessel identification and ongoing requirements to guide vessels through the corridor,” Jack Kennedy, head of Middle East and North Africa country risk at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said in an email.
Also, the threat of war will linger if Iran keeps throttling the strait. The Persian Gulf states do not want Iran to have such power over the waterway. Oman, the country on the other side of the strait, could invite ships to pass close to its coastline, but such a move might prompt Iran to attack the vessels.
Given that more than 100 large commercial ships have gone through the strait since the war began, some vessel operators are willing to negotiate with Iran and even pay millions of dollars for a passage. Shipping companies are losing money on vessels that are waiting to go through the strait, so they may be willing to pay large sums to get their ships out into the Indian Ocean and operating normally.
Still, the larger, more established shipping companies may decide that doing business with Iran is too much of a legal risk, particularly if the United States continues to impose sanctions on Iran.
“The issue of sanctions on Iran makes it a very complicated process, since it involves financial transactions with a sanctioned regime,” Ms. Raydan said.
When the fighting began, the cost of “war risk” insurance for ships and cargo going through the strait skyrocketed. A few shipping companies bought it, and it has been available at times during the war, Mr. Seikaly, the insurance executive, said. But the fragility of the cease-fire has driven down demand for insurance.
“It is not the right moment, and everyone knows that,” he said.
Farnaz Fassihi has covered Iran and Lebanon for decades, living and traveling in both countries. She was a war correspondent in the Middle East for 15 years.
Less than twenty-four hours after Iran and the United States agreed to a cease-fire, a disagreement surfaced over whether or not the terms applied to Lebanon, where Israel is bombarding Hezbollah.
Iran said the deal included Lebanon. The U.S. said it did not.
Israel attacked more than 100 targets in Lebanon, including many buildings in Beirut, on Wednesday in one of the deadliest attacks on the country during the war. Lebanese officials said 180 people were killed and 900 were injured. The attacks risked unraveling the fragile cease-fire between Tehran and Washington.
“Once again you have shown that you do not understand the concept of a cease-fire, and only fire will bring you to your senses. So you must wait for it,” said Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Iranian Parliament’s national security committee, in a social media post.
Vice President JD Vance said the cease-fire focused only on Iran. Lebanon, he said, was not part of the deal, and the Iranians misunderstood.
It was not immediately clear if Iran planned to retaliate by striking Israel, or if Tehran was merely toughening its rhetoric to pressure President Trump to rein in Israel. But Iran was clearly signaling that protecting Hezbollah and including it in the cease-fire was a priority.
“If we show weakness for one of our allies, in this case Hezbollah, and abandon it, it would send the wrong message to all our allies that we don’t have their back even when we ask that they have ours,” said Mehdi Rahmati, an analyst in Tehran, in a telephone interview.
Mr. Rahmati said Hezbollah’s entering the war in early March and launching rocket attacks on Israel had strained and distracted Israel’s air defenses, allowing for more precision attacks from Iran and adding a layer of psychological pressure on Israel.
Hezbollah and its Shiite constituents have also suffered heavy blows in recent weeks. Israeli airstrikes have devastated their stronghold towns and neighborhoods in southern Lebanon and in southern Beirut, and more than a million people have been displaced in Lebanon, mostly Shiites.
Two Iranian officials, one of them a Revolutionary Guards member who has worked with Hezbollah, said in interviews that Iran had a moral responsibility and a strategic interest in insisting that the cease-fire include Hezbollah. The officials, who asked not to be named because they were discussing sensitive issues, said Iran wanted to show its other allies in the region that it would not abandon them if they intervened militarily on Iran’s behalf.
Iran funds, trains and arms several militant groups known in the region as the “axis of resistance.” They include Hezbollah, Shia groups in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas and Palestinian Jihad in Gaza.
The Houthis didn’t enter the conflict until March 28, and even then not in full force. Iran had planned to leverage the Houthis’ ability to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait, at the mouth of the Red Sea, if the war intensified and Americans staged a ground invasion, the officials said. The Houthis said they had a “duty” to help a fellow Muslim country.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said in a social media post that the United States must choose between a cease-fire and war via Israel, and that it cannot have both.
There were also reports of cease-fire violations in Iran, with an attack on Lavan island in the Persian Gulf and drone sightings in several locations including the capital, Tehran, and the city of Bushehr. In Shushtar, a city in southwestern Iran, a 7-year-old girl was killed and six people injured when Iran’s air defense shot down a drone, according to a statement from local officials.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, who brokered the cease-fire, said in a social media post that violations had occurred across the war theater and urged all sides to allow for peace negotiations.
Sina Azodi, the director the Middle East department at George Washington University said that Iran wanted “a clear slate, and no war anywhere in the region when it reaches a long term cease-fire with the United States.” He continued, “If they allow the attacks on Hezbollah to continue, it risks dragging them back into conflict.”
An earlier version of this article misidentified the city in Iran where a child was killed when the country’s air defenses shot down a drone. It is Shushtar, not Bushehr. The article also described incorrectly a statement by an Iranian official on social media. Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, said that the United States must choose between a cease-fire and war via Israel, and that it cannot have both — not that it could have both.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at corrections@nytimes.com.Learn more
In a statement published by the Iran-backed militant group’s media arm, Hezbollah said it had targeted Israel with a rocket salvo early on Thursday morning in the Middle East, and said its attacks would continue until Israeli aggression against Lebanon ceased. It said Israel’s strikes on Wednesday were a violation of the cease-fire agreement.
Israeli officials and the White House have said the cease-fire does not include Lebanon, contradicting Iran and Pakistan, which mediated the truce.
In the past 24 hours, the first full day since the tentative cease-fire between the United States and Iran was announced, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, or HRANA, said there were no casualties to report so far across Iran. HRANA did say there had been at least 20 attacks recorded, many either before the truce was announced or shortly afterward.
HRANA said that since the war began on Feb. 28, at least 1,701 civilians, including 254 children, have been killed in Iran.
At around 2:20 a.m. Thursday in Israel, the Israeli military detected rockets fired from Lebanon toward the country, according to an Israeli military spokeswoman. The spokeswoman said the missiles were believed to have been fired by Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, and that all of the missiles had been intercepted.
Hezbollah said in a statement that the group had a right to respond to Israeli attacks, which killed at least 182 people on Wednesday.
Reporting from Washington
President Trump faces new diplomatic tests as he prepares for weekend talks with Tehran amid doubts about the durability of his day-old cease-fire with Iran and the prospects for building it into a broader peace settlement.
A White House official said on Wednesday that Vice President JD Vance would lead a U.S. delegation to Pakistan for a meeting on Saturday with Iranian officials. Mr. Vance will be joined in the capital, Islamabad, by Mr. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner as they work to bridge huge political differences, some dating back decades, under a two-week clock set by the cease-fire agreement.
But even as Trump officials finalized the Saturday meeting, fractures were already emerging in the limited cease-fire brokered by Pakistan on Tuesday night, just ahead of Mr. Trump’s deadline for a threatened “civilization”-ending attack on Iran.
Robert Malley, who served as President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s special envoy for Iran, said the cease-fire was filled with ambiguities. The United States and Iran are already arguing over them, he said, and that will complicate the path forward.
“It’s hard to know not just where you go from here, but where you are to begin with,” he said. “The talks are starting on very weak grounds.”
In a statement on social media, Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, insisted that three clauses of what he said was a 10-point “agreed framework” between the U.S. and Iran had already been violated, including an end to Israeli attacks on Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. The Trump administration says that was not part of the agreement.
Mr. Ghalibaf also condemned the Trump administration for reasserting on Wednesday that Iran would never be allowed to have a domestic uranium enrichment program, as Tehran has long demanded.
“In such situation, a bilateral cease-fire or negotiations is unreasonable,” wrote Mr. Ghalibaf, who Iranian state media has said will represent Iran in Islamabad this weekend.
At the same time, U.S. officials were watching to see whether Iran would deliver on its promise to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Tehran militarized in response to the conflict. By Wednesday night, there was little evidence that significant shipping traffic through the mine-laden waterway was resuming.
While the United States and Iran will surely bluster and jockey for advantage in public, diplomats and Iran experts said, both sides may have enough incentives to muddle their way through to Islamabad without allowing the cease-fire to collapse. Iran’s military and political leadership has been devastated by the five-week war, while Mr. Trump is under heavy pressure from a skeptical public, rising energy prices and growing dissent among his supporters as the fall midterm elections approach.
“It’s going to be a very messy, imperfect cease-fire,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert and vice president at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution in Washington. “But my sense is that both sides want to at least test what’s possible at the negotiating table.”
Those possibilities may be limited, but the White House struck an optimistic tone.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Wednesday that the United States had received an Iranian proposal that provided “a workable basis on which to negotiate,” notably different from Mr. Ghalibaf’s description of the document as an “agreed framework.” She added that the proposal was “more reasonable and entirely different” from an earlier list of Iranian demands, which she said had been “thrown in the garbage.”
The newer proposal has not been released publicly. “These extraordinarily sensitive and complex negotiations will take place behind closed doors over the course of the next two weeks,” Ms. Leavitt said.
She also cautioned reporters against relying on statements from Iranian officials and state media, which have contained such maximalist Iranian demands as the lifting of all U.S. sanctions on Iran’s economy, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Middle East and a domestic uranium enrichment program.
But experts said it was unlikely that Iranian leaders had suddenly made major new concessions, given the consistency of Iran’s demands over several years and the economic leverage it has demonstrated by choking off vital energy and chemical shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.
Mr. Ghalibaf’s statement made clear, for instance, that Iran still insisted on what it called its sovereign right to enrich uranium, the refining process that produces fuel for nuclear power or atomic bombs. The Trump administration has said that Iran must agree to zero enrichment, and on Wednesday Ms. Leavitt told reporters that ensuring “the end of uranium enrichment in Iran” remained a nonnegotiable demand for the president.
Given such a wide gap, Mr. Malley said it was highly unlikely the Trump administration could quickly conclude a wide-ranging bargain with Iran, especially in such a short time. He called it more plausible that the two sides would find limited agreements that sidestep the most difficult matters, including the fate of Iran’s nuclear program and its stockpile of nearly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium.
“It’s hard to imagine a comprehensive deal given the gaps and differing visions of both sides,” Mr. Malley said. “You can imagine a series of smaller deals that includes the Strait of Hormuz and some sanctions relief.”
Ms. Maloney and others said the addition of Mr. Vance to the U.S. negotiating team was a notable shift in Mr. Trump’s diplomatic approach.
It was Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner who led two previous rounds of talks with Iranian officials over the country’s nuclear program, one last spring and one in late February. Analysts said that Iran likely views them with profound skepticism given that Mr. Trump launched attacks after both, including on the day before the United States joined Israel in opening the latest conflict with a massive airstrike that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and several other senior officials.
The Iranians may be more receptive to Mr. Vance, a longtime skeptic of American military action who publicly warned, before he took office last year, that the United States would be foolish to start a war with Iran and shared private reservations as Mr. Trump weighed whether to attack earlier this year.
But veteran diplomats reiterated concerns that Mr. Trump was again assigning high-stakes talks to negotiators with very little background in Iran or nuclear issues.
R. Nicholas Burns, who negotiated with Iran as a senior State Department official during the George W. Bush administration, urged the Trump team to loop in Iran experts in the career Foreign Service who have been largely sidelined.
“The fact that these senior career diplomats were excluded from the Witkoff-led talks with the Iranian foreign minister before the war was diplomatic malpractice,” Mr. Burns said. “Our career diplomats who speak fluent Farsi and understand the negotiating behavior of the Iranians are a hidden strength of the U.S.”
Mr. Burns urged Trump officials to focus in the coming days on ensuring that Iran never gains access to its highly enriched uranium, much or all of which is believed to be buried under the rubble of airstrikes last summer and to ensure that Iran does not become a “gatekeeper” in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has made recent public demands for lucrative payments to allow commercial shipping through the waterway.
Mr. Trump may have simplified matters somewhat during a national address last week when he suggested that he might no longer demand that Iran surrender its uranium stockpile. Mr. Trump said that what he called Iran’s “nuclear dust” was deeply buried and that the U.S. could detect and stop any attempt by Iran to access it.
But Mr. Burns said he was skeptical about the prospect of a broad agreement. “Iran’s interest will be to drag out the talks, sticking to demanding U.S. concessions that President Trump cannot meet,” he said.
“The Iran government negotiators are experienced, cynical and adept at hiding the truth,” he added.
Further complicating the diplomatic mix is the role of Israel, which one senior U.S. official called an uncertain variable. Israel could push to renew the war and pursue its goal of sparking a popular uprising that would topple Iran’s surviving clerical leaders, which goes beyond Mr. Trump’s currently stated war aims.
Mr. Trump will also face pressure from Iran hawks at home not to cut a deal of convenience with Iran that ends the war without resolving long-term issues.
The influential talk radio host Mark Levin, who has Mr. Trump’s ear, has been highly critical of the cease-fire. The U.S. official said that Mr. Trump could sour on the agreement if those voices were not offset by prominent war critics like the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Mr. Trump could also be triggered by Iran’s boastful domestic messaging, which is consistent with the kind of posturing routine in Middle East diplomacy, but which might provoke a U.S. president highly attuned to appearances.
Hours after the Tuesday cease-fire, Iran’s National Security Council released a statement celebrating the country’s “undeniable, historical, and crushing defeat” of the U.S. and claiming that Mr. Trump had agreed to a list of huge concessions, such as a full U.S. military withdrawal from the region, that Trump officials call fictitious.
Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.
Supporters of the Iranian government observed the 40th day of mourning on Wednesday for its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with gatherings in streets, squares and mosques across the country, including in Tehran, Mashhad and Qom.
The observances follow Chehelom, a Shiite mourning tradition commemorating 40 days after a death that is widely observed in Iran, and they come weeks after Khamenei was killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes. Khamenei has not been formally buried, and no date for a public funeral has been announced.
As Wednesday drew to a close in Iran, it remained unclear whether the country would allow ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway whose opening has been a sticking point of the war. Iranian state media said this afternoon that the strait had been “fully closed.” But the country’s official broadcaster also said that because of anti-ship mines in the traffic zones, vessels must coordinate with the Iranian navy and use designated routes to cross the waterway.
No oil tankers have crossed the strait since the cease-fire was announced, according to data from Kpler, a global ship-tracking firm. The group has so far tracked four crossings of bulk carriers, or merchant ships designed to transport dry cargo, through the strait today.
The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran raged for more than five weeks before a cease-fire was announced on the 39th day. It was the second time in less than a year that President Trump directly involved the United States in a military conflict with Tehran.
Cast by Mr. Trump in part as an effort to spur Iranians to topple their theocratic leadership, the conflict soon became a regional war that resulted in thousands of deaths, mostly in Iran and Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced from their homes, and the global economy has been badly rattled.
Here are some key moments in the war:
Feb. 28: The United States and Israel launched strikes across Iran, hitting a government compound in Tehran and military targets. The blasts killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation’s supreme leader for almost 37 years, as well as other high-level military and intelligence leaders.
At least 175 people, most of them likely children, were killed in a strike on a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran, health officials and Iranian state media said. The strike was a targeting mistake by the U.S. military, according to U.S. officials familiar with a military investigation.
Iran retaliated by firing missiles and drones at Israel and at U.S. military bases in the region, including in Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
March 1: An Iranian drone attack killed six U.S. soldiers in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, the first Americans to die in the war.
Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group, dragged Lebanon into the conflict, firing rockets toward Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader.
In a brief telephone interview with The New York Times, Mr. Trump offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how a new government could take shape in Iran and how the conflict would unfold. Asked how long the United States and Israel intended to sustain its assault on Iran, Mr. Trump said “four to five weeks.”
March 8: With several top Iranian leaders killed in airstrikes, Iran named Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of the slain supreme leader, as his father’s successor. Mr. Khamenei, 56, was appointed by a committee of senior Shiite clerics, signaling continuity and defiance after Mr. Trump called him an “unacceptable” choice. But it would be several days before Iran would hear from its new supreme leader, who U.S. officials said had been injured in the war’s initial days.
March 11: Iran escalated its attacks in and around the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes a significant portion of the world’s oil and natural gas supply, striking at least three ships, according to a British maritime agency. Iran claimed responsibility for one assault on a bulk carrier from Thailand. The attacks sent oil prices surging and the Trump administration scrambling to pacify global markets.
March 12: Mojtaba Khamenei issued his first written statement as supreme leader, directing the military to continue choking off the Strait of Hormuz.
Six American crew members died after a KC-135 military refueling aircraft crashed in Iraq, bringing the number of U.S. service members killed in the war to at least 13.
March 13: The U.S. military conducted a large bombing raid on Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export hub. Mr. Trump said the raid had targeted military infrastructure but did not hit oil facilities on the island, which is responsible for about 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports.
March 17: The Israeli military killed two of Iran’s top leaders: Ali Larijani, the head of the country’s National Security Council, and Gholamreza Soleimani, the head of the Basij, a militia aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The deaths represented the biggest blows to Iran’s leadership since Feb. 28.
March 18: Iran and U.S. allies traded attacks on key energy infrastructure in the Gulf. Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gas field, which accounts for about 70 to 75 percent of its natural gas production. Qatar, a U.S. ally, said Iran had struck its Ras Laffan Industrial City, which is the world’s largest liquefied natural gas export plant.
March 23: Mr. Trump said that the United States and Iran were discussing an end to the war. It was the first public indication of diplomatic talks since the war began.
March 27: An Iranian strike injured 12 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia on the Prince Sultan Air Base, one of the most serious breaches of U.S. air defenses since the start of the war.
March 28: The Houthis, an Iran-backed militant group in Yemen, joined the war by launching a ballistic missile at Israel that was intercepted.
April 3: Iran shot down a U.S. Air Force F-15E fighter jet carrying two crew members, one of whom was recovered safely that day. The risky search-and-rescue operation for the second airman lasted two days and took commandos deep inside Iran. The downing of the F-15E was the first time that a U.S. combat aircraft was shot down in the war.
April 7: Mr. Trump announced a two-week cease-fire with Iran. Iran’s National Security Council confirmed the agreement, casting it as a victory.
Read the full story at nyt News.
Lebanon Mourns After Israeli Barrage Kills at Least 182 People
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/9/2026, 1:27:00 PM
Lebanon began a period of national mourning on Thursday, a day after Israeli forces unleashed an intense barrage of airstrikes across the country in the deadliest day of the war with Hezbollah.
At least 182 people were killed on Wednesday and 900 others wounded in the wave of Israeli strikes across the Lebanese capital, Beirut, and in southern and eastern Lebanon, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
The bombardment — the Israeli authorities said that they had launched more than 100 airstrikes in the space of 10 minutes — was a sharp escalation in the fighting after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Lebanon would be excluded from the cease-fire with Iran.
The strikes pummeled several crowded areas of Beirut, sending plumes of black, acrid smoke billowing over the skyline and setting off a scramble to rescue those trapped under the rubble of apartment buildings.
On Wednesday evening, Haniya Faraj, 50, was outside the American University of Beirut Medical Center, searching for a relative who had been at a coffee shop near a strike in Mazraa, a neighborhood in central Beirut.
“Nine of my relatives were injured in that attack, my two uncles, their wives, my son,” she said. “I don’t know if there are more, my head is about to explode, I can’t reach all my family members.”
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
Christina Goldbaum is The Times’s bureau chief in Beirut, leading coverage of Lebanon and Syria.
Read the full story at nyt News.
Here’s the latest.
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/9/2026, 1:14:58 PM
Beirut/Tel Aviv11:38 a.m. April 9
Pinned
The cease-fire between the United States and Iran entered its second day on Thursday despite confusion over the status of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway that Iran has effectively blockaded, and over Lebanon, where Israel continued attacks against the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah.
On Wednesday, Iran said Lebanon was included in the cease-fire and accused the United States of not upholding its end of the deal. Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said Washington had to choose between a cease-fire or continued war via Israel. Pakistan, which mediated the truce, said the deal covered Lebanon, a claim disputed by the White House.
Israel, which said that the cease-fire did not extend to Lebanon, attacked more than 100 targets there on Wednesday, and Lebanese officials said 180 people were killed and 900 were injured. Hezbollah said on Thursday that it had targeted Israel with a rocket salvo in retaliation, and that it planned to continue attacking until Israeli aggression against Lebanon ceased.
Late Wednesday, President Trump wrote on social media that the U.S. military ships, aircraft and personnel would stay near Iran until a “REAL AGREEMENT” is reached between the two countries. If not, he said, fighting would resume “bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has seen before.”
Peace talks hosted by Pakistan were scheduled to begin in Islamabad on Saturday morning, and Vice President JD Vance was expected to travel there with a group that includes Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law.
Reza Amiri Moghadam, Iran’s ambassador to Pakistan, said on social media that the Iranian delegation was expected to arrive in Islamabad on Thursday night. The post was later deleted.
The announcement of the two-week truce calmed global markets and sent the price of oil below $100. Brent crude, the international oil price standard, ended Wednesday at $94.75 per barrel, still about 30 percent higher than it was before the war. It had skyrocketed, going above $110 for a period, after the war began on Feb. 28 and Iran moved to block the Strait of Hormuz, a vital global oil and gas conduit.
Persian Gulf countries have been fending off missile and drone attacks almost daily during the war but there were no such reports on Thursday morning from the government ministries that have typically reported previous strikes in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.
Despite that apparent calm, the status of the strait was unclear.
Under the cease-fire deal, Iran said it would allow ships to pass through the strait as long as they coordinated with the Iranian military. But as of Thursday morning, no oil and gas tankers had made the crossing since the cease-fire took effect, according to data from the ship-tracking firm Kpler.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
Lebanon: Israel’s strikes in Lebanon against Hezbollah, which has mounted rocket attacks on Israel in solidarity with Iran, prompted Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to threaten a military response against “aggressors in the region” if the attacks didn’t end immediately.
What’s next: Iran publicly released what it said was the 10-point framework for talks that Mr. Trump described as “a workable basis on which to negotiate” an end to the war. A White House official said the points did not match what Mr. Trump was referring to. Read more ›
Nuclear demand: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called on Iran to turn over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, saying that Mr. Trump could still order U.S. special forces to seize the material. Read more ›
Death tolls: The Human Rights Activists News Agency said at least 1,665 civilians, including 244 children, had been killed in Iran as of Monday. 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.
Lebanon’s health minister said the death toll from the Israeli strikes on Wednesday has climbed to 203 people, and more than 1,000 others have been wounded. It was the deadliest day in the war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group, since fighting escalated last month.
France has condemned Israel’s intensifying strikes on Lebanon and said the country should be included in the cease-fire between Iran and the United States. Jean-Noël Barrot, the foreign minister, told France Inter radio that the attacks were “all the more intolerable because they undermine” that truce. “Iran must stop terrorizing Israel through Hezbollah,” Barrot said. But he added that Lebanon should not be the “scapegoat” of an Israeli government that is “frustrated because a cease-fire has been reached between the United States and Iran.”
"La destruction de l'État libanais ne détruira pas le Hezbollah, au contraire"
Jean-Noël Barrot "condamne fermement" les frappes israéliennes au Liban, qui "ne doit pas être la victime expiatoire d'un gouvernement contrarié parce qu'un cessez-le-feu a été trouvé entre les… pic.twitter.com/eAzVG3JsnH
Britain’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, has said Lebanon should be included in the Iran cease-fire and criticized Israel’s escalating attacks on Lebanon, saying that the barrage on Wednesday “was deeply damaging.” Ms. Cooper told Times Radio on Thursday that failing to include Lebanon in the truce “will destabilize the whole region,” after Israel and the United States said it was not part of the agreement.
She made the comments as Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain arrived in the United Arab Emirates as part of a visit to Gulf allies. On Wednesday, Starmer held talks with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah and discussed efforts to convene international partners to agree plans to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Downing Street said.
One major shipping company said that the situation in the Strait of Hormuz had not changed since yesterday. “Given the ongoing uncertainty and the lack of reliable security guarantees, it will only become clear in the coming days whether and how we will be able to pass through the Strait of Hormuz,” said Leon Schulz, a spokesman for Hapag-Lloyd, a German shipping group.
The Israeli military said on Thursday that it had killed the personal secretary to Hezbollah’s leader, Naim Qassem, in its attacks on parts of Beirut a day earlier. The personal secretary, Ali Yusuf Harshi, “played a central role in managing and securing” the office of Hezbollah’s leader, the military added.
Across Iran on Thursday morning, supporters of the government gathered for mourning processions to commemorate the 40th day since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the counry’s longtime supreme leader, was killed in American and Israeli airstrikes. Photos posted on state media showed large crowds walking through the streets of the capital, Tehran, and several other cities. In Shia Islam, the 40th day after a death is an important milestone in the mourning process, when people gather to commemorate the person who died.
The day after Israel unleashed a wave of devastating strikes in several parts of Beirut that killed at least 182 people, the signs of destruction are everywhere. Mangled cars, blown-out shopfronts, sidewalks caked in dust and piles of twisted rebar. Search and rescue teams are combing through the rubble from destroyed apartment buildings, and many people are believed to be under the rubble.
Lebanon began a period of national mourning on Thursday, a day after Israeli forces unleashed an intense barrage of airstrikes across the country in the deadliest day of the war with Hezbollah.
At least 182 people were killed on Wednesday and 900 others wounded in the wave of Israeli strikes across the Lebanese capital, Beirut, and in southern and eastern Lebanon, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
The bombardment — the Israeli authorities said that they had launched more than 100 airstrikes in the space of 10 minutes — was a sharp escalation in the fighting after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Lebanon would be excluded from the cease-fire with Iran.
The strikes pummeled several crowded areas of Beirut, sending plumes of black, acrid smoke billowing over the skyline and setting off a scramble to rescue those trapped under the rubble of apartment buildings.
On Wednesday evening, Haniya Faraj, 50, was outside the American University of Beirut Medical Center, searching for a relative who had been at a coffee shop near a strike in Mazraa, a neighborhood in central Beirut.
“Nine of my relatives were injured in that attack, my two uncles, their wives, my son,” she said. “I don’t know if there are more, my head is about to explode, I can’t reach all my family members.”
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
Persian Gulf countries have been fending off missile and drone attacks almost daily during the war, but there were no such reports on Thursday morning from the ministries that have typically announced them in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.
The Iranian delegation will arrive in Pakistan tonight for talks with the United States, Reza Amiri Moghadam, Iran’s ambassador in Pakistan, said on social media on Thursday. That post was later deleted from his account. The negotiations are scheduled to begin in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, on Saturday, according to Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary.
Just before midnight, President Trump wrote on social media that all U.S. military personnel and assets will stay near Iran until a “REAL AGREEMENT” is reached between the two countries.
“If for any reason it is not, which is highly unlikely, then the ‘Shootin’ Starts,’ bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before,” he wrote.
Toward the end of last month, there were more than 50,000 American troops in the Middle East, roughly 10,000 more than usual.
Hundreds of tankers are waiting to return to the Strait of Hormuz so that the waterway can once again become a conduit for a fifth of the world’s oil and gas.
But the shaky cease-fire struck between the United States and Iran has not coaxed the tankers back — and even if it holds, other obstacles have to be overcome for shipping traffic to return to normal.
Iran has kept a stranglehold on the strait throughout the war by laying mines and attacking vessels. As part of the cease-fire, Iran’s foreign minister said, the country will allow “safe passage” for ships through the strait, but he added that the vessels would have to coordinate with Iran’s armed forces and that passages would be subject to “technical limitations.”
Only four vessels traveled through the strait on Wednesday, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, down from an average of nine a day over the previous five days. And shipping analysts said there were no signs of large-scale positioning or queuing to go through the strait.
The fragility of the cease-fire — Iran said on Wednesday that Israel’s attacks on targets in Lebanon had violated the agreement — was the main reason ships were holding back, shipping industry participants said.
“It’s too unstable for anyone to commit,” said Oscar Seikaly, chief executive of NSI Insurance Group, a maritime insurance brokerage.
First, shipping analysts say, there has to be confidence that the cease-fire will hold. And then there has to be a declaration from Iran that it will not attack vessels.
“Iran must clarify that the strait is open for safe passage. Otherwise, vessels should not be expected to sail through the way they were doing prior to the war,” said Noam Raydan, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
But Iran is also demanding that it oversee and coordinate passages through the strait. The government hasn’t clearly stated what vessel operators must do to gain permission to pass through. Some shipowners have made “toll” payments to Iran. And, according to Kpler, a shipping tracking firm, most of the crossings during the war have taken a route that goes close to Iran’s coast. This suggests that Iran requires taking this route.
Iran’s official broadcaster said on Wednesday that, because of anti-ship mines in the traffic zones, vessels must coordinate with the Iranian Navy and use designated routes to cross the waterway.
The governments of India, Pakistan and Thailand have worked with Iran to ensure safe passage of vessels.
In a joint statement on Wednesday, the leaders of seven European nations, Canada, the European Commission and the European Council said their governments “will contribute to ensuring freedom of navigation” in the strait.
President Trump suggested on Wednesday that the United States might jointly control the strait with Iran.
“The United States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz,” Mr. Trump said in a social media post. “There will be lots of positive action! Big money will be made.”
ABC News reported on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had told one of its reporters that the United States could operate shipping in the strait “as a joint venture” with Iran.
Analysts say Iran can continue to act as a gatekeeper if the number of vessels going through the strait remains relatively small. But it would not be able to manage the more than 100 ships a day that passed through the strait before the war.
“Blanket passage arrangements are unlikely to be implementable by Iran, due to capacity constraints around vessel identification and ongoing requirements to guide vessels through the corridor,” Jack Kennedy, head of Middle East and North Africa country risk at S&P Global Market Intelligence, said in an email.
Also, the threat of war will linger if Iran keeps throttling the strait. The Persian Gulf states do not want Iran to have such power over the waterway. Oman, the country on the other side of the strait, could invite ships to pass close to its coastline, but such a move might prompt Iran to attack the vessels.
Given that more than 100 large commercial ships have gone through the strait since the war began, some vessel operators are willing to negotiate with Iran and even pay millions of dollars for a passage. Shipping companies are losing money on vessels that are waiting to go through the strait, so they may be willing to pay large sums to get their ships out into the Indian Ocean and operating normally.
Still, the larger, more established shipping companies may decide that doing business with Iran is too much of a legal risk, particularly if the United States continues to impose sanctions on Iran.
“The issue of sanctions on Iran makes it a very complicated process, since it involves financial transactions with a sanctioned regime,” Ms. Raydan said.
When the fighting began, the cost of “war risk” insurance for ships and cargo going through the strait skyrocketed. A few shipping companies bought it, and it has been available at times during the war, Mr. Seikaly, the insurance executive, said. But the fragility of the cease-fire has driven down demand for insurance.
“It is not the right moment, and everyone knows that,” he said.
Farnaz Fassihi has covered Iran and Lebanon for decades, living and traveling in both countries. She was a war correspondent in the Middle East for 15 years.
Less than twenty-four hours after Iran and the United States agreed to a cease-fire, a disagreement surfaced over whether or not the terms applied to Lebanon, where Israel is bombarding Hezbollah.
Iran said the deal included Lebanon. The U.S. said it did not.
Israel attacked more than 100 targets in Lebanon, including many buildings in Beirut, on Wednesday in one of the deadliest attacks on the country during the war. Lebanese officials said 180 people were killed and 900 were injured. The attacks risked unraveling the fragile cease-fire between Tehran and Washington.
“Once again you have shown that you do not understand the concept of a cease-fire, and only fire will bring you to your senses. So you must wait for it,” said Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Iranian Parliament’s national security committee, in a social media post.
Vice President JD Vance said the cease-fire focused only on Iran. Lebanon, he said, was not part of the deal, and the Iranians misunderstood.
It was not immediately clear if Iran planned to retaliate by striking Israel, or if Tehran was merely toughening its rhetoric to pressure President Trump to rein in Israel. But Iran was clearly signaling that protecting Hezbollah and including it in the cease-fire was a priority.
“If we show weakness for one of our allies, in this case Hezbollah, and abandon it, it would send the wrong message to all our allies that we don’t have their back even when we ask that they have ours,” said Mehdi Rahmati, an analyst in Tehran, in a telephone interview.
Mr. Rahmati said Hezbollah’s entering the war in early March and launching rocket attacks on Israel had strained and distracted Israel’s air defenses, allowing for more precision attacks from Iran and adding a layer of psychological pressure on Israel.
Hezbollah and its Shiite constituents have also suffered heavy blows in recent weeks. Israeli airstrikes have devastated their stronghold towns and neighborhoods in southern Lebanon and in southern Beirut, and more than a million people have been displaced in Lebanon, mostly Shiites.
Two Iranian officials, one of them a Revolutionary Guards member who has worked with Hezbollah, said in interviews that Iran had a moral responsibility and a strategic interest in insisting that the cease-fire include Hezbollah. The officials, who asked not to be named because they were discussing sensitive issues, said Iran wanted to show its other allies in the region that it would not abandon them if they intervened militarily on Iran’s behalf.
Iran funds, trains and arms several militant groups known in the region as the “axis of resistance.” They include Hezbollah, Shia groups in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas and Palestinian Jihad in Gaza.
The Houthis didn’t enter the conflict until March 28, and even then not in full force. Iran had planned to leverage the Houthis’ ability to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait, at the mouth of the Red Sea, if the war intensified and Americans staged a ground invasion, the officials said. The Houthis said they had a “duty” to help a fellow Muslim country.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said in a social media post that the United States must choose between a cease-fire and war via Israel, and that it cannot have both.
There were also reports of cease-fire violations in Iran, with an attack on Lavan island in the Persian Gulf and drone sightings in several locations including the capital, Tehran, and the city of Bushehr. In Shushtar, a city in southwestern Iran, a 7-year-old girl was killed and six people injured when Iran’s air defense shot down a drone, according to a statement from local officials.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, who brokered the cease-fire, said in a social media post that violations had occurred across the war theater and urged all sides to allow for peace negotiations.
Sina Azodi, the director the Middle East department at George Washington University said that Iran wanted “a clear slate, and no war anywhere in the region when it reaches a long term cease-fire with the United States.” He continued, “If they allow the attacks on Hezbollah to continue, it risks dragging them back into conflict.”
An earlier version of this article misidentified the city in Iran where a child was killed when the country’s air defenses shot down a drone. It is Shushtar, not Bushehr. The article also described incorrectly a statement by an Iranian official on social media. Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, said that the United States must choose between a cease-fire and war via Israel, and that it cannot have both — not that it could have both.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at corrections@nytimes.com.Learn more
In a statement published by the Iran-backed militant group’s media arm, Hezbollah said it had targeted Israel with a rocket salvo early on Thursday morning in the Middle East, and said its attacks would continue until Israeli aggression against Lebanon ceased. It said Israel’s strikes on Wednesday were a violation of the cease-fire agreement.
Israeli officials and the White House have said the cease-fire does not include Lebanon, contradicting Iran and Pakistan, which mediated the truce.
In the past 24 hours, the first full day since the tentative cease-fire between the United States and Iran was announced, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, or HRANA, said there were no casualties to report so far across Iran. HRANA did say there had been at least 20 attacks recorded, many either before the truce was announced or shortly afterward.
HRANA said that since the war began on Feb. 28, at least 1,701 civilians, including 254 children, have been killed in Iran.
At around 2:20 a.m. Thursday in Israel, the Israeli military detected rockets fired from Lebanon toward the country, according to an Israeli military spokeswoman. The spokeswoman said the missiles were believed to have been fired by Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, and that all of the missiles had been intercepted.
Hezbollah said in a statement that the group had a right to respond to Israeli attacks, which killed at least 182 people on Wednesday.
Reporting from Washington
President Trump faces new diplomatic tests as he prepares for weekend talks with Tehran amid doubts about the durability of his day-old cease-fire with Iran and the prospects for building it into a broader peace settlement.
A White House official said on Wednesday that Vice President JD Vance would lead a U.S. delegation to Pakistan for a meeting on Saturday with Iranian officials. Mr. Vance will be joined in the capital, Islamabad, by Mr. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner as they work to bridge huge political differences, some dating back decades, under a two-week clock set by the cease-fire agreement.
But even as Trump officials finalized the Saturday meeting, fractures were already emerging in the limited cease-fire brokered by Pakistan on Tuesday night, just ahead of Mr. Trump’s deadline for a threatened “civilization”-ending attack on Iran.
Robert Malley, who served as President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s special envoy for Iran, said the cease-fire was filled with ambiguities. The United States and Iran are already arguing over them, he said, and that will complicate the path forward.
“It’s hard to know not just where you go from here, but where you are to begin with,” he said. “The talks are starting on very weak grounds.”
In a statement on social media, Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, insisted that three clauses of what he said was a 10-point “agreed framework” between the U.S. and Iran had already been violated, including an end to Israeli attacks on Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. The Trump administration says that was not part of the agreement.
Mr. Ghalibaf also condemned the Trump administration for reasserting on Wednesday that Iran would never be allowed to have a domestic uranium enrichment program, as Tehran has long demanded.
“In such situation, a bilateral cease-fire or negotiations is unreasonable,” wrote Mr. Ghalibaf, who Iranian state media has said will represent Iran in Islamabad this weekend.
At the same time, U.S. officials were watching to see whether Iran would deliver on its promise to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Tehran militarized in response to the conflict. By Wednesday night, there was little evidence that significant shipping traffic through the mine-laden waterway was resuming.
While the United States and Iran will surely bluster and jockey for advantage in public, diplomats and Iran experts said, both sides may have enough incentives to muddle their way through to Islamabad without allowing the cease-fire to collapse. Iran’s military and political leadership has been devastated by the five-week war, while Mr. Trump is under heavy pressure from a skeptical public, rising energy prices and growing dissent among his supporters as the fall midterm elections approach.
“It’s going to be a very messy, imperfect cease-fire,” said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert and vice president at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution in Washington. “But my sense is that both sides want to at least test what’s possible at the negotiating table.”
Those possibilities may be limited, but the White House struck an optimistic tone.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Wednesday that the United States had received an Iranian proposal that provided “a workable basis on which to negotiate,” notably different from Mr. Ghalibaf’s description of the document as an “agreed framework.” She added that the proposal was “more reasonable and entirely different” from an earlier list of Iranian demands, which she said had been “thrown in the garbage.”
The newer proposal has not been released publicly. “These extraordinarily sensitive and complex negotiations will take place behind closed doors over the course of the next two weeks,” Ms. Leavitt said.
She also cautioned reporters against relying on statements from Iranian officials and state media, which have contained such maximalist Iranian demands as the lifting of all U.S. sanctions on Iran’s economy, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Middle East and a domestic uranium enrichment program.
But experts said it was unlikely that Iranian leaders had suddenly made major new concessions, given the consistency of Iran’s demands over several years and the economic leverage it has demonstrated by choking off vital energy and chemical shipments through the Strait of Hormuz.
Mr. Ghalibaf’s statement made clear, for instance, that Iran still insisted on what it called its sovereign right to enrich uranium, the refining process that produces fuel for nuclear power or atomic bombs. The Trump administration has said that Iran must agree to zero enrichment, and on Wednesday Ms. Leavitt told reporters that ensuring “the end of uranium enrichment in Iran” remained a nonnegotiable demand for the president.
Given such a wide gap, Mr. Malley said it was highly unlikely the Trump administration could quickly conclude a wide-ranging bargain with Iran, especially in such a short time. He called it more plausible that the two sides would find limited agreements that sidestep the most difficult matters, including the fate of Iran’s nuclear program and its stockpile of nearly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium.
“It’s hard to imagine a comprehensive deal given the gaps and differing visions of both sides,” Mr. Malley said. “You can imagine a series of smaller deals that includes the Strait of Hormuz and some sanctions relief.”
Ms. Maloney and others said the addition of Mr. Vance to the U.S. negotiating team was a notable shift in Mr. Trump’s diplomatic approach.
It was Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner who led two previous rounds of talks with Iranian officials over the country’s nuclear program, one last spring and one in late February. Analysts said that Iran likely views them with profound skepticism given that Mr. Trump launched attacks after both, including on the day before the United States joined Israel in opening the latest conflict with a massive airstrike that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and several other senior officials.
The Iranians may be more receptive to Mr. Vance, a longtime skeptic of American military action who publicly warned, before he took office last year, that the United States would be foolish to start a war with Iran and shared private reservations as Mr. Trump weighed whether to attack earlier this year.
But veteran diplomats reiterated concerns that Mr. Trump was again assigning high-stakes talks to negotiators with very little background in Iran or nuclear issues.
R. Nicholas Burns, who negotiated with Iran as a senior State Department official during the George W. Bush administration, urged the Trump team to loop in Iran experts in the career Foreign Service who have been largely sidelined.
“The fact that these senior career diplomats were excluded from the Witkoff-led talks with the Iranian foreign minister before the war was diplomatic malpractice,” Mr. Burns said. “Our career diplomats who speak fluent Farsi and understand the negotiating behavior of the Iranians are a hidden strength of the U.S.”
Mr. Burns urged Trump officials to focus in the coming days on ensuring that Iran never gains access to its highly enriched uranium, much or all of which is believed to be buried under the rubble of airstrikes last summer and to ensure that Iran does not become a “gatekeeper” in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has made recent public demands for lucrative payments to allow commercial shipping through the waterway.
Mr. Trump may have simplified matters somewhat during a national address last week when he suggested that he might no longer demand that Iran surrender its uranium stockpile. Mr. Trump said that what he called Iran’s “nuclear dust” was deeply buried and that the U.S. could detect and stop any attempt by Iran to access it.
But Mr. Burns said he was skeptical about the prospect of a broad agreement. “Iran’s interest will be to drag out the talks, sticking to demanding U.S. concessions that President Trump cannot meet,” he said.
“The Iran government negotiators are experienced, cynical and adept at hiding the truth,” he added.
Further complicating the diplomatic mix is the role of Israel, which one senior U.S. official called an uncertain variable. Israel could push to renew the war and pursue its goal of sparking a popular uprising that would topple Iran’s surviving clerical leaders, which goes beyond Mr. Trump’s currently stated war aims.
Mr. Trump will also face pressure from Iran hawks at home not to cut a deal of convenience with Iran that ends the war without resolving long-term issues.
The influential talk radio host Mark Levin, who has Mr. Trump’s ear, has been highly critical of the cease-fire. The U.S. official said that Mr. Trump could sour on the agreement if those voices were not offset by prominent war critics like the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Mr. Trump could also be triggered by Iran’s boastful domestic messaging, which is consistent with the kind of posturing routine in Middle East diplomacy, but which might provoke a U.S. president highly attuned to appearances.
Hours after the Tuesday cease-fire, Iran’s National Security Council released a statement celebrating the country’s “undeniable, historical, and crushing defeat” of the U.S. and claiming that Mr. Trump had agreed to a list of huge concessions, such as a full U.S. military withdrawal from the region, that Trump officials call fictitious.
Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.
Supporters of the Iranian government observed the 40th day of mourning on Wednesday for its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with gatherings in streets, squares and mosques across the country, including in Tehran, Mashhad and Qom.
The observances follow Chehelom, a Shiite mourning tradition commemorating 40 days after a death that is widely observed in Iran, and they come weeks after Khamenei was killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes. Khamenei has not been formally buried, and no date for a public funeral has been announced.
As Wednesday drew to a close in Iran, it remained unclear whether the country would allow ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway whose opening has been a sticking point of the war. Iranian state media said this afternoon that the strait had been “fully closed.” But the country’s official broadcaster also said that because of anti-ship mines in the traffic zones, vessels must coordinate with the Iranian navy and use designated routes to cross the waterway.
No oil tankers have crossed the strait since the cease-fire was announced, according to data from Kpler, a global ship-tracking firm. The group has so far tracked four crossings of bulk carriers, or merchant ships designed to transport dry cargo, through the strait today.
The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran raged for more than five weeks before a cease-fire was announced on the 39th day. It was the second time in less than a year that President Trump directly involved the United States in a military conflict with Tehran.
Cast by Mr. Trump in part as an effort to spur Iranians to topple their theocratic leadership, the conflict soon became a regional war that resulted in thousands of deaths, mostly in Iran and Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced from their homes, and the global economy has been badly rattled.
Here are some key moments in the war:
Feb. 28: The United States and Israel launched strikes across Iran, hitting a government compound in Tehran and military targets. The blasts killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation’s supreme leader for almost 37 years, as well as other high-level military and intelligence leaders.
At least 175 people, most of them likely children, were killed in a strike on a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran, health officials and Iranian state media said. The strike was a targeting mistake by the U.S. military, according to U.S. officials familiar with a military investigation.
Iran retaliated by firing missiles and drones at Israel and at U.S. military bases in the region, including in Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
March 1: An Iranian drone attack killed six U.S. soldiers in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait, the first Americans to die in the war.
Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group, dragged Lebanon into the conflict, firing rockets toward Israel in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader.
In a brief telephone interview with The New York Times, Mr. Trump offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how a new government could take shape in Iran and how the conflict would unfold. Asked how long the United States and Israel intended to sustain its assault on Iran, Mr. Trump said “four to five weeks.”
March 8: With several top Iranian leaders killed in airstrikes, Iran named Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of the slain supreme leader, as his father’s successor. Mr. Khamenei, 56, was appointed by a committee of senior Shiite clerics, signaling continuity and defiance after Mr. Trump called him an “unacceptable” choice. But it would be several days before Iran would hear from its new supreme leader, who U.S. officials said had been injured in the war’s initial days.
March 11: Iran escalated its attacks in and around the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes a significant portion of the world’s oil and natural gas supply, striking at least three ships, according to a British maritime agency. Iran claimed responsibility for one assault on a bulk carrier from Thailand. The attacks sent oil prices surging and the Trump administration scrambling to pacify global markets.
March 12: Mojtaba Khamenei issued his first written statement as supreme leader, directing the military to continue choking off the Strait of Hormuz.
Six American crew members died after a KC-135 military refueling aircraft crashed in Iraq, bringing the number of U.S. service members killed in the war to at least 13.
March 13: The U.S. military conducted a large bombing raid on Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export hub. Mr. Trump said the raid had targeted military infrastructure but did not hit oil facilities on the island, which is responsible for about 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports.
March 17: The Israeli military killed two of Iran’s top leaders: Ali Larijani, the head of the country’s National Security Council, and Gholamreza Soleimani, the head of the Basij, a militia aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The deaths represented the biggest blows to Iran’s leadership since Feb. 28.
March 18: Iran and U.S. allies traded attacks on key energy infrastructure in the Gulf. Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gas field, which accounts for about 70 to 75 percent of its natural gas production. Qatar, a U.S. ally, said Iran had struck its Ras Laffan Industrial City, which is the world’s largest liquefied natural gas export plant.
March 23: Mr. Trump said that the United States and Iran were discussing an end to the war. It was the first public indication of diplomatic talks since the war began.
March 27: An Iranian strike injured 12 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia on the Prince Sultan Air Base, one of the most serious breaches of U.S. air defenses since the start of the war.
March 28: The Houthis, an Iran-backed militant group in Yemen, joined the war by launching a ballistic missile at Israel that was intercepted.
April 3: Iran shot down a U.S. Air Force F-15E fighter jet carrying two crew members, one of whom was recovered safely that day. The risky search-and-rescue operation for the second airman lasted two days and took commandos deep inside Iran. The downing of the F-15E was the first time that a U.S. combat aircraft was shot down in the war.
April 7: Mr. Trump announced a two-week cease-fire with Iran. Iran’s National Security Council confirmed the agreement, casting it as a victory.
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