Top Stories — Wednesday, April 8, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- World leaders welcome Iran cease-fire but want Strait of Hormuz opened soon. — nyt News
- Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia lead tech rally after Trump announces ceasefire with Iran — CNBC
- Gas Prices Won’t Quickly Return to Prewar Levels, Even if the Strait of Hormuz Reopens — nyt News
World leaders welcome Iran cease-fire but want Strait of Hormuz opened soon.
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/8/2026, 8:01:14 PM
Beirut/Tel Aviv5:42 p.m. April 8
A fragile cease-fire between the United States and Iran appeared to be holding on Wednesday, as both sides claimed victory amid deep uncertainty about plans to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz and the next steps in the diplomatic process.
President Trump said Wednesday that the United States would “work closely with Iran” after demanding Tehran’s “unconditional surrender” for weeks. Iranian officials were triumphant after the agreement, brokered by Pakistan, was announced, with Mohammad Reza Aref, the country’s first vice president, saying on social media that “the era of Iran” had begun after Mr. Trump failed to destroy the Islamic Republic’s government. Iran said the strait would remain open while negotiations took place.
Shipping companies signaled that they were cautious about resuming transit through the waterway. Two bulk carriers crossed on Wednesday, according to Kpler, a tracking company. A handful of ships have been observed moving through each day since the war began. More than 400 vessels remain “effectively stranded” in the Persian Gulf, Kpler said.
Israel, which said the cease-fire did not extend to Lebanon, on Wednesday carried out its largest strike against Hezbollah since that front opened up following the militant group’s rocket attacks on Israel in solidarity with Iran in March. Lebanon’s health ministry said that dozens of people had been killed and hundreds more wounded in the strikes on Beirut, the Lebanese capital, and other parts of the country.
Further highlighting the fragility of the truce, Iran’s state media reported that an oil refinery on Lavan, an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf, was struck by unspecified “enemies.” Fresh Iranian attacks were also reported in some Persian Gulf countries. Kuwait’s defense ministry said that its air defenses had engaged with at least 28 drones from Iran despite the cease-fire.
Investors welcomed the cease-fire after weeks of war, which caused an energy crisis and turmoil for global markets. The price of oil tumbled on Wednesday, with Brent crude, the international benchmark, down almost 15 percent to about $95 a barrel. Global stock markets soared.
Worldwide relief at the pause in fighting was tempered by confusion over what would come next. Many challenges remain if the United States and Iran are to achieve a permanent deal to end the war. And restarting operations at damaged refineries, storage facilities, and oil and gas fields will take time.
Nima, who lives in the Iranian capital, Tehran, said Wednesday morning was the first time in around 40 days that he had not feared his colleagues might be killed in an airstrike. It was a good feeling, he said — the latest in a swirl of emotions experienced by Iranians like him, after Mr. Trump’s threat to wipe out their civilization on Tuesday and reports of a flurry of negotiations to pause the war.
“Last night was a really frightening evening,” said Nima, who declined to be fully named, fearing reprisals from the government.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
U.S. defense officials: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held a news conference at the Pentagon. They presented a partial list of Iranian targets hit during the war, and statistics they claimed illustrated the damage to Iran’s military. Mr. Hegseth said that additional U.S. forces would remain in the region during the temporary truce.
Israel: Critics of Mr. Netanyahu called the cease-fire “a diplomatic disaster,” and accused him of failing to achieve his stated war goal of destroying Iran’s theocratic government.
Persian Gulf: Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates reported missile and drone attacks on Wednesday. Bahrain’s interior ministry sounded warning sirens and reported a fire started by an Iranian attack.
Pakistan: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan said he had invited U.S. and Iranian delegations for talks in Islamabad on Friday, and Iran’s National Security Council said that Iran would attend. The Trump administration said it was in discussions about holding in-person talks with Iran.
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.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday called on Iran to turn over its stockpile of 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium, saying that President Trump could still order a U.S. commando raid to seize the material, which could be quickly made ready to use in a nuclear device.
The uranium is deeply buried at a site in Isfahan under the rubble from American B-2 bombing strikes last June, and Mr. Trump has said one of the main goals of the Iran war is to ensure Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon.
“We know exactly what they have,” Mr. Hegseth told reporters at a news conference at the Pentagon the day after the United States and Tehran agreed on a two-week cease-fire as a step to negotiate a broader resolution.
“They will either give it to us,” Mr. Hegseth said of the enriched material, “or we’ll take it out.” Such a mission would at a minimum involve hundreds of U.S. Special Operations troops and would come with high risks, current and former commanders say.
When asked exactly how the enriched uranium would be removed, Mr. Hegseth said: “That’s something the president is going to solve.”
At the news conference, Mr. Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that all their military objectives had been achieved in what Mr. Hegseth called “a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield.”
General Caine said the 38-day air campaign by the United States had destroyed 80 percent of Iran’s air defense systems, about 800 storage facilities for one-way attack drones, some 450 ballistic missile storage sites and more than 150 ships. He also said that the campaign had destroyed Iran’s industrial base, meaning it would take years to rebuild.
But before the two-week cease-fire, the battered Iranian military was still capable of firing 15 to 30 ballistic missiles and 50 to 100 one-way attack drones each day, and its forces shot down two American fighter jets last week.
Some experts on Iran’s military said the Pentagon’s focus on bombs dropped missed the larger point of a war with no real strategic aim. “You’re trying to define victory by how many people you killed,” said Vali Nasr, an Iranian expert at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s like a doctor who says, ‘I have a really sharp scalpel.’ ”
Mr. Hegseth was asked about the president’s threat on Tuesday to wipe out a civilization, and whether the American military was ready to do so. He replied: “We had a target set locked and loaded” and proceeded to mention bridges and power plants. Hitting such civilian infrastructure would be war crimes under international law, legal experts have said.
U.S. military officials say they have found some legal wiggle room by arguing that such infrastructure sites are also used by the Iranian military, but most legal experts say that justification is a stretch.
The secretary listed the names of several senior Iranian military leaders killed in the five-week campaign. But Iran’s decentralized command structure — operating under an arguably even more hard-line military command than before the war — has still been able to order attacks against energy infrastructure in neighboring countries and keep the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to most commercial shipping.
The prime minister of Pakistan, which helped mediate the two-week cease-fire between the U.S. and Iran, said on social media that cease-fire violations had been reported since the truce went into effect earlier on Wednesday. Israel has bombarded Lebanon on Wednesday as part of its assault against Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group; Pakistan said the truce was supposed to include Lebanon. Arab states in the Persian Gulf have reported incoming Iranian rocket and drone fire. Sharif called for all sides to “to exercise restraint and respect the ceasefire for two weeks” on social media.
The cease-fire between the United States and Iran triggered a wave of relief around the world but many leaders tempered their response with caution, and even condemnation.
In Europe, where the conflict strained diplomatic relations with the United States, leaders expressed relief and a desire to reopen the Strait of Hormuz quickly.
“I welcome the two-week cease-fire the US and Iran agreed last night,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said on social media. “It brings much-needed de-escalation.”
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, described the deal as “a step back from the brink.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, who has been sharply criticized by President Trump for not doing more to support the U.S. war effort, said the cease-fire would “bring a moment of relief to the region and the world.”
Even amid the welcome pause in hostilities, some world leaders underscored their opposition to Mr. Trump’s decision to launch the war in the first place.
“The momentary relief cannot make us forget the chaos, the destruction, and the lives lost,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain, one of the loudest European critics of Mr. Trump, said. “The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.”
President Emmanuel Macron of France said he remained concerned about the “critical” situation in Lebanon, after Israel said that the cease-fire did not cover its military offensive against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed armed group based there. Israel’s strikes and occupation of southern Lebanon “cannot be a long-term solution,” he said.
Russia, an ally of Iran, welcomed the truce and said it hoped that the United States would now be able to resume peace talks over its war in Ukraine.
The Persian Gulf countries that have been hardest hit by the most Iranian attacks, including Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, were more cautious. Many of them reported new Iranian attacks on Wednesday, adding to skepticism that the cease-fire would hold.
Qatar’s foreign ministry said it considered the cease-fire “an initial step toward de-escalation,” and hoped that Iran would “cease all hostile acts and practices that undermine regional stability.”
Kuwait’s foreign ministry urged Iran and its “proxies, including factions, militias, and armed groups loyal to it” to cease all hostilities.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi of Japan spoke with Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, soon after the cease-fire took effect. She told reporters that she had asked Mr. Pezeshkian to “promptly and quickly” ensure the safe passage of all vessels through the Strait of Hormuz. Japan imports about 95 percent of its oil from the Middle East, and more than 40 Japanese vessels have been stuck in the strait since the war started at the end of February.
Some countries, like France, were looking toward the next steps in securing shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Macron said “about fifteen” countries were planning a mission that is “strictly defensive in coordination with Iran once conditions are met” to facilitate the resumption of traffic in the strait.
China, which is the biggest buyer of Iranian oil, was noncommittal about whether it would provide security guarantees following a request from Iran’s ambassador to Beijing to do so.
“We hope that all parties will resolve their disputes through dialogue and negotiation,” Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry, said at its daily news conference.
Enjoli Liston, Javier C. Hernández, Keith Bradsher and Vivian Nereim contributed reporting.
President Trump threatened in a social media post to impose high tariffs — 50 percent on all goods — on any country that sold “military weapons” to Iran. It was not immediately clear whether Trump’s statement reflected a genuine and enforceable change in policy, as the Supreme Court has ruled against Trump’s sweeping tariffs in the past. If carried out, the country most affected would be Russia, which accounts for the most of Iran’s arms imports, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Some countries in the Persian Gulf continued to report fresh attacks. Saudi Arabia’s defense ministry said it had intercepted and destroyed nine drones over the past few hours. It did not say where the drones had been launched from.
Lebanon’s prime minister, Nawaf Salam, condemned the wave of strikes that Israel just carried out across the country, accusing Israel of disregarding “all regional and international efforts to end the war.” Salam welcomed President Trump’s agreement with Iran and said the Lebanese government had intensified efforts to reach a cease-fire in Lebanon too, but added that Israel was only escalating its attacks by “targeting densely populated residential areas and claiming the lives of innocent civilians throughout Lebanon.”
Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan
Pakistan’s role as a key mediator between the United States and Iran followed months of cultivating ties with the Trump administration and years of building deep bonds with Iran, enabling it to place itself at the center of efforts to resolve this conflict.
“I am pleased to announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate cease-fire,” Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said on social media. “EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY,” he added in capital letters, echoing President Trump’s typographical style.
An hour earlier, Mr. Trump had said he had agreed to a cease-fire after speaking with Mr. Sharif and Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, confirmed that an agreement had been reached and thanked the Pakistani leaders for their “tireless efforts.”
In mediating between these two parties, Pakistan pulled off one of its most resounding diplomatic victories in years. It is a stunning reversal of fortunes for a country that Mr. Trump once derided as offering “nothing but lies and deceit” and that the Biden administration shunned.
“For Pakistan, it really is a large feather in the cap,” said Michael Kugelman, a senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council, a research institute. “Pakistan has long grappled with a very poor global image, where countries didn’t see it as being able to be influential regionally or even globally.”
Until last year, Pakistan was perceived as an unreliable partner that had played a double game by offering support to the United States in the war in Afghanistan, one of its neighbors, while also backing the Taliban. That perception still holds in some diplomatic and defense circles in Washington, according to current and former Pakistani and U.S. diplomats as well as analysts.
After the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Pakistan became an afterthought in Washington as American officials focused on strengthening ties with India, Pakistan’s archrival.
But Pakistani officials began courting Mr. Trump and his inner circle shortly after he was re-elected and have secured deals on crypto and critical minerals. They have joined Mr. Trump’s Board of Peace, they nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize last year, and they have effusively thanked him for helping to end a short-lived conflict with India last May — even though Indian officials say he did not.
Mr. Trump has called Pakistan’s army chief his “favorite field marshal,” and the two have met at least three times over the past year.
“Pakistan has been willing to engage in unconventional diplomatic tactics that score points in Washington — including excessive flattery and commercial opportunities with Trump’s inner circle,” said Mr. Kugelman.
Yet the cease-fire announced late Tuesday arrived with lots of uncertainty about its details, raising questions about where it would hold.
Israel disputed parts of Mr. Sharif’s statement by saying that the deal did not include Lebanon, where it has conducted a military campaign in recent weeks and which it continued hitting on Wednesday. More than 1,400 people have died there, according to the Lebanese government.
Pakistani leaders have been relaying messages between the Trump administration and the Iranian government for weeks, with Mr. Sharif and his foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, calling dozens of foreign leaders, while Field Marshal Munir has focused on U.S. officials.
Field Marshal Munir had been discussing Iran with Mr. Trump for nearly a year, including at a lunch at the White House last June after which Mr. Trump said that Pakistani officials “know Iran very well, better than most.”
Decades of deep bonds with Iran and a 565-mile border help explain why Pakistan has such knowledge, and Pakistan has long conveyed messages to the United States on Iran’s behalf.
“Pakistan has represented Iranian interests in Washington for decades, like the Swiss have done so for the United States in Tehran,” said Azeema Cheema, the founding director of Verso Consulting, an Islamabad-based research firm.
Pakistan inserted itself as a mediator in the Iran war with the backing of China, where Mr. Dar traveled last week to meet his counterpart, Wang Yi.
Ms. Cheema also pointed to other international connections. “For Pakistan, there are obvious shared interests with the Turks and Egyptians: The three are middle powers that form the current geographical borders of this war,” she said.
Mr. Sharif invited U.S. and Iranian officials for talks in Islamabad on Friday. President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran confirmed that Iran would attend, Mr. Sharif said on Wednesday after the two spoke on the phone. As of Wednesday, the United States had yet to confirm that its officials would attend.
In the news conference, Hegseth called on Iran to turn over its stockpile of 970-pounds of highly enriched uranium and said that Trump could still send in Special Operations troops to grab the material, which could be used to build a nuclear device. The uranium is deeply buried under the rubble from U.S. airstrikes last summer. “If we have to, we can do it by any means necessary,”Hegseth said. Such a mission would at a minimum involve hundreds of U.S. troops and come with high risks.
Hegseth was asked how the U.S. plans to get Iran’s highly enriched uranium. His answer: “That’s something the President is going to solve.” The news conference has ended.
The fate of highly enriched uranium in Iran remained uncertain on Wednesday after U.S. and Iranian officials agreed to a two-week cease-fire, bringing 40 days of war to a pause.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, estimated in a February report that Iran had about 440 kilograms, or about 970 pounds, of highly enriched uranium as of June 2025. Experts say that material could be used to develop a small number of nuclear bombs.
While the cease-fire deal did not appear to address the uranium issue, Iran and the United States could discuss it during talks that Pakistani mediators were pressing both sides to attend in the coming days.
President Trump has vowed to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. On Wednesday, he wrote on social media that the United States would work with Iran to dig up the “Nuclear ‘Dust,” saying it was deeply buried because of American strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. The comment was an apparent reference to the enriched uranium.
Last week, he implied that the United States could accept some scenario in which the enriched uranium stayed in Iranian territory.
Speaking at the White House, Mr. Trump said Iran’s nuclear sites had been hit so hard in war that it would take months “to get near the nuclear dust.” He said that the United States had the sites under “intense satellite surveillance” and would strike them again if Iran moved to extract the material.
Some former Israeli security officials said that Israelis were concerned that the cease-fire could hold beyond two weeks without an agreement to ensure the highly enriched uranium was removed from Iran.
“This fear exists,” said Brig. Gen. Eran Ortal, a former Israeli military official.
Other former Israeli security officials expressed confidence that if Mr. Trump makes a deal with Iran during the cease-fire, it will ensure the removal of the uranium.
Even if Iran’s leadership loses access to the material, the country could turn to allies like North Korea for help obtaining a nuclear weapon, General Ortal noted.
“If the Iranians decide the only thing that will protect the regime is a nuclear weapon, especially after being incapable of defending themselves during the war, they have pathways to that beyond the 440 kilograms,” he said.
“The central question,” he added, “is, ‘What will the determination of the United States and the world be to prevent them from going down that path?”
Hegseth just called President Trump “a president of peace.”
Hegseth said the military was monitoring Iran’s highly enriched uranium at the Isfahan site, a key objective of President Trump’s, and said the U.S. might still launch a risky operation to seize it. “We know exactly what they have,” he said. He added: “They will either give it to us, which the president has laid out,” or, “We’ll get it. We’ll take it, take it out.”
Hegseth was asked about the president’s threat to wipe out a civilization, and whether the American military was ready to do so. He replied: “We had a target set locked and loaded” and proceeded to mention bridges and power plants. Hitting such civilian infrastructure would be war crimes under international law. U.S. military officials say they find some wiggle room there by arguing that such infrastructure are also used by the Iranian military, but that most legal war experts say that is a stretch.
Hegseth said that U.S. forces would remain in the region during the cease-fire. “We’ll be hanging around, not going anywhere,” he said, adding that the military was going “to make sure Iran complies with this cease-fire” including ships’ safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz.
Gen. Dan Caine talked about the “professionalism and courage of the United States military.” He has not mentioned that this military’s commander in chief on Tuesday threatened to deploy them to end a civilization, a mission that would be at odds with centuries of American military ethics.
General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a rundown of the the damage the U.S. military says it did to the Iranian military. He said the 38-day air campaign destroyed 80 percent of Iran’s air defense systems, 800 one-day attack drone storage facilities, 450 ballistic missile storage facilities and more than 150 ships. He also said that the campaign destroyed Iran’s industrial base, meaning it would take years to rebuild.
This is another one of those Pentagon press conferences when Hegseth and Caine present a partial listing of Iranian targets hit, sprinkled with percentages they purport show how degraded the Iranian military is. But Iran military experts say this focus on bombs dropped misses the larger point of a war with no real strategic aim. “You’re trying to define victory by how many people you killed,” said Vali Nasr, an Iranian expert at Johns Hopkins University. “Its like a doctor who says, ‘I have a really sharp scalpel.’”
Hours after the United States and Iran agreed to a cease-fire — ending, for now, the airstrikes, destruction and immediate fear that Iranians have faced for six weeks — many in Iran said they were grappling with a confusing brew of emotions.
“Right now, it feels like a kind of limbo — I don’t know how it will end, but the war was heading in directions that I found frightening,” Iraj, a Tehran resident, said on Wednesday. “I just know that I feel better today compared to yesterday.”
Asked about how he felt about the cease-fire, Mohammad, who also lives in Tehran, said he was unhappy — because Iran’s authoritarian government was still in place, he implied. “But I didn’t want the war to reach a stage where it would seriously harm all of our lives,” he said. “I’m worried that the economic and cultural situation of society will become worse than before.”
Communicating via text messages and voice notes, sent during an ongoing internet shutdown, Iranians reflected on what they had been put through, and what they might face next. Like Mohammad and Iraj, they all asked to be identified by their first names only or not at all, fearing reprisal from the government.
Many expressed concern about the country’s economic ruin. Schools, hospitals, homes, bridges and roads have been destroyed, as have major companies that employed tens of thousands and fueled Iran’s domestic economy.
Iraj worried that popular grievances, which led to a wave of protests in January, would soon pile up again in the absence of government action to address such complaints. “We still don’t have proper mechanisms for protest, and there are many dissatisfied people,” he said.
But he said he had never liked the United States and Israel, and still felt the same way. “I hope other people also come to understand that they are not saviors,” he said.
Iranians opposed to the government said they were dismayed that it had survived, despite the killings of its top leaders and statements from U.S. and Israeli leaders, earlier in the war, that they wanted drastic political change in Iran.
In the weeks before the bombing began, some Iranians had expressed hope that foreign intervention would lead to the toppling of the regime.
Several people reached on Wednesday said they feared that in the weeks and months to come, the government would flex its power at home to reassert its authority.
In recent days, Iran carried out a string of executions of people who had been arrested during the January protests. A prominent human rights lawyer was detained last week, and dozens of people have been arrested, some of them for sending information to foreign media outlets.
A Tehran resident in his 20s said he worried that the government would now be emboldened to crush its opponents “even harder.”
Hegseth said the U.S. was prepared on Tuesday to carry out massive strikes against “power plants, the bridges, and oil and energy infrastructure targets they could not defend and could not realistically rebuild.” He added that it would have taken decades to rebuild.
Hegseth said the U.S. military had carried out more than 800 strikes against Iranian targets on Tuesday, before a two-week ceasefire took effect on Tuesday night.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ticked off the names of several senior Iranian military leaders killed in the five-week campaign, but Iran’s decentralized command structure has still been able to order attacks against energy infrastructure in neighboring countries and keep the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to most commerical shipping.
President Trump posted to social media on Wednesday — one of his first statements since the cease-fire went into effect — that appeared to lay out some of his positions in projected negotiations with Iran to reach a permanent end to the war. There “will be no enrichment of uranium,” Trump wrote Truth Social, and the U.S. and Iran would remove the highly enriched stockpiles in Iran’s possession. In exchange, Iran would receive “tariff and sanctions relief,” he added.
Iran’s 10-point list of demands, as portrayed in Iranian media, seem to be very different: the acceptance of Iran’s right to enrich and the removal of sanctions without any mention of the fate of the highly enriched uranium, which the U.S. and Israel says could one day form the basis for a nuclear weapon.
There were few signs on Wednesday of a large-scale return of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, after Iran promised the “safe passage” of vessels in the crucial waterway as part of its cease-fire with the United States.
That could change, experts said, if shipping operators concluded that the terms of making the passage were clear and the risks of attacks were reduced. Global shipping traffic and energy flows could yet take months to return to prewar levels, they added.
Iran has blocked the strait, which carries a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil and one-fifth of its gas, throughout the war by laying mines and launching sporadic attacks on ships.
A Greek-owned bulk carrier and a Liberia-flagged vessel crossed the strait on Wednesday, according to Kpler, a global ship-tracking firm. But there were also “no clear signs yet of large-scale positioning or queuing that would indicate ships are preparing to move through in significant numbers,” said Dimitris Ampatzidis, a senior risk and compliance analyst at Kpler. “Most operators appear to be holding back.”
Around 800 tankers have been waiting on either side of the strait to pass through, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Even if ship traffic ramps up, the damage and disruption to energy infrastructure in the region during the war means that stabilizing the global fuel supply remains a costly and time-consuming project.
Iran has said that it will have a role in organizing traffic through the strait. Shipping companies may balk at negotiating with Iranian authorities, especially if the terms of a passage are not clear and require large payments.
Iran’s foreign minister said in a statement early Wednesday that safe passage through the strait would be possible if coordinated with Iran’s military and with consideration of “technical limitations.” President Trump said on social media that the United States would be “helping with the traffic build up in the Strait of Hormuz.” In a joint statement, the leaders of seven European nations, Canada, the European Commission and the European Council said that their governments “will contribute to ensuring freedom of navigation” in the strait.
But the lack of clarity about Iran’s “limitations” and what exactly the military coordination would look like has left the industry wary.
“Shipping companies will be keen to understand: ‘What exactly does that mean, and what does that require?’” said Jennifer Parker, a former naval officer now at the University of Western Australia’s Defense and Security Institute. “There will be some uncertainty in terms of whether Iran can be trusted on this point.”
Mr. Ampatzidis said a public declaration from Iran stating that it would stop targeting vessels would help reassure shipping operators.
Before the war, more than 130 ships typically crossed the Strait of Hormuz each day. Only about 120 ships in total have made the passage since the start of the war more than a month ago, Ms. Parker said.
For shipping to return to normal, insurance for vessels and their cargo must be available at affordable rates. Insurance has been provided for at least some of the recent passages through the strait, according to industry participants. But insurers are looking for signs that the cease-fire will hold.
“Time will tell whether it is a pause or a peace but, in the meantime, it is highly unlikely that trade into the Gulf will simply resume,” Neil Roberts, the head of marine and aviation at the Lloyd’s Market Association, a trade body for insurance underwriters in London, said in a statement. “The region remains at heightened risk with none of the underlying tensions resolved.”
The shipping giant Maersk said in a statement on Wednesday that it welcomed the cease-fire agreement but that it did not yet have full certainty that passing the strait would be safe. It said it was not making any changes to specific services, saying it would continue to assess the risks before making any decisions.
Another shipping giant, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, said in a statement that it was still suspending trips through the strait while “closely monitoring the situation.”
“Based on our current risk assessment, we are currently refraining from transiting the strait,” Leon Schulz, a spokesman for the shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd, said in a statement, adding that whether the announced opening will actually hold will become clear in the coming days.
Shippers could easily lose confidence amid the fragile situation, Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst in defense strategy at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said.
“All it will take is one incident with the Iranian forces maybe harassing a ship or a mine hitting a ship,” he said.
Even if the strait is reopened, it is likely to face persistent threats, including from Iran-backed proxy militias, for the foreseeable future, said Zhuwei Wang, director of research and analysis at S&P Global Energy, a research firm.
The broader, global supply of fuel will take even longer to restore. Strikes on refineries, storage facilities and oil and gas fields around the Persian Gulf have caused at least 10 percent of the world’s oil supply to be turned off, and extensive equipment repairs are needed before operations can restart.
Global jet fuel supplies, for example, could take months to return to normal even after the Strait of Hormuz reopens because of the disruptions to refineries, said Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Transport Association, which represents more than 360 airlines.
While crude oil prices might continue falling, the costs of jet fuel — a highly refined product derived from crude — will remain elevated, Mr. Walsh told reporters in Singapore on Wednesday.
Alex Travelli and Jim Tankersley contributed reporting.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared on Wednesday that “Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield.” But before the two-week ceasefire, Iran was still capable of firing 15 to 30 ballistic missiles and 50 to 100 one-way attack drones each day, and shot down two fighter jets last week.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has begun speaking at a news conference.
In a joint statement just released, the leaders of seven European nations, plus Canada, the European Commission and the European Council, said their governments “will contribute to ensuring freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.” The group includes France, Germany, Britain and, notably, Spain, which has drawn President Trump’s ire for its opposition to the Iran war.
The United Arab Emirates’ air defenses engaged 17 ballistic missiles and 35 drones launched from Iran over the past day, according to an update from the defense ministry. Since the war began, the Emirates said it has been targeted with 537 ballistic missiles, 26 cruise missiles, and 2,256 drones.
Tankers stranded in the Persian Gulf need more than assurance that they will be safe from missiles and mines; they also need insurance before they can sail. Lloyd’s of London, the world’s leading insurance marketplace, released a statement on Wednesday saying that while “Several shipowners are planning swift exits from the Middle East Gulf in the wake of a two-week cease-fire,” immediate movement is still not possible. “Moving before new protocols are clarified could expose crews, ships and cargoes to heightened risk” that cannot yet be calculated, Lloyd’s said.
The nearly six-week U.S.-Israeli bombardment of Iran has decimated the country’s clerical, military and political leadership, throwing domestic politics into disarray and opening the door to even greater military control of Iran’s government.
The dust has yet to settle on a cease-fire agreed Tuesday evening, and it’s unclear exactly what near- and medium-term impact the war may have had on Iran’s leadership or on how the country’s political system evolves. Iran’s government, always a challenge to understand, has become more opaque than ever.
The new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has not been seen in public since gaining the post, after his father was killed at the outset of the war. He has so far communicated only through written statements. His absence has fueled speculation that the country is actually being run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, an ideologically hard-line military force that became a heavyweight player in Iran’s politics and economy over the past four decades.
Though Ayatollah Khamenei is head of state, he “appears largely reduced to a ceremonial role,” Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute, said in an email.
Authority in recent years had already been effectively delegated to other power centers, including the president, the speaker of Parliament, the head of the judiciary and members of the I.R.G.C., Mr. Alfoneh said. Within that collective leadership, the Guards had the upper hand, he added.
Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, the commander of the Guards, and Mohsen Rezaei, a former commander who is now a senior adviser to Ayatollah Khamenei, are both pragmatic figures, Mr. Alfoneh said. They are committed to a strategy of “leveraging economic pressure on the global system — and, by extension, U.S. domestic politics — to deter further American military action against Iran in the near term.”
For Iran, Mr. Alfoneh wrote in a social media post on Wednesday, “survival is victory.”
By decapitating Iran’s military leadership, the war has also enabled the rise of a younger generation of leaders in the Guards who will take on more significant roles in the coming years, said Hamidreza Azizi, an expert on Iranian security issues at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, a research organization.
While the older Guards had been shaped by the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Mr. Azizi said, the younger crowd were shaped by the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring uprisings and Iranian interventions in the Middle East.
Those events have given them a better grasp of the hybrid nature of modern warfare, he said, and an understanding of the links between social discontent and external threats. Though members of this younger generation may not be less ideological in their way of thinking, they may be more pragmatic about addressing the Iranian people’s economic grievances, he added.
And whereas the Guards’ current leaders learned military strategy ad hoc on the battlefield during the 1980s, the new generation had benefited from professional military universities and formal education.
“These guys know what modern warfare means, what military doctrine means,” Mr. Azizi said. What would likely emerge from this, he added, was “a transformation that could actually strengthen their position if the system survives.”
Mr. Azizi noted that, in the hours after the cease-fire was announced, he had observed some dissatisfaction and frustration in the commentary of people close to the younger Guards.
If Iran’s demands were to be cemented in an eventual peace agreement, that younger generation may accept it, he said. But if Iran is instead attacked again in the coming weeks or months, that could result in a “serious gap” between the younger generation and the Guards’ current leadership.
Reporting from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv
That, he said, meant removing Iran’s nuclear threat and destroying its ballistic missile program before their components were buried deep underground, protected from aerial attack. Mr. Netanyahu added that it also required “creating the conditions” for the Iranian people to topple their government.
On Wednesday morning in Israel, hours after President Trump announced a two-week cease-fire, the sirens warning of incoming Iranian missiles may have gone silent but there was no guarantee that any of those goals had been achieved.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office issued a dry statement, in English, saying, “Israel supports” Mr. Trump’s decision, along with the U.S. effort to ensure, through further negotiations, that Iran would no longer pose a threat.
But Mr. Netanyahu’s critics were far from convinced.
“There has never been such a diplomatic disaster in all of our history,” Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of Israel’s opposition, said in a statement.
“Israel was not even at the table when decisions were made concerning the core of our national security,” Mr. Lapid noted, adding that the prime minister had “failed diplomatically, failed strategically, and did not meet a single one of the goals that he himself set.”
With elections in Israel due before the end of October, Mr. Netanyahu has much riding on how the outcome of the war is perceived at home.
The war likely degraded Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities, but there were no signs that the Iranian government was about to fall. Many analysts argue that by merely surviving, the Islamic republic has actually become stronger than before Israel and the United States launched their military offensive in late February.
Freedom of movement through the key maritime route of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran effectively blockaded for several weeks, and the global energy crisis that the bottleneck caused were more pressing issues for the United States than for Israel.
Israel was more concerned about the fate of Iran’s stockpile of some 400 kilograms, around 900 pounds, of highly enriched uranium that was buried beneath a nuclear facility near the city of Isfahan during strikes last June. What happens to that stockpile is unclear.
The 12-day war in June was waged largely by Israel. The United States joined toward the end and dropped the bunker-busting bombs that did the bulk of the damage at Iran’s nuclear sites. That conflict came to an abrupt halt when Mr. Trump announced a cease-fire.
Israel was then surprised at how quickly Iran began to reconstitute its ballistic missile production industry, Israeli experts said — a factor that Mr. Netanyahu said precipitated his decision to launch a new military offensive alongside the United States.
Mr. Netanyahu has championed his close partnership with Mr. Trump as his prized asset, but analysts say the relationship also comes with constraints: The Israeli leader can prod and lobby the White House, but Mr. Trump ultimately calls the shots.
Though Wednesday was a Jewish holiday and many of Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing and religiously observant coalition partners did not immediately weigh in, there were some early signs of disgruntlement even from within his government.
Tzvika Foghel, a lawmaker from the far-right Jewish Power party led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the ultranationalist national security minister, sharply criticized Mr. Trump in a social media post. “Donald, you ducked out!” Mr. Foghel wrote. The post was later deleted.
Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group in Lebanon, had joined the latest conflict by firing rockets at Israel in solidarity with Tehran, prompting a new, broad Israeli offensive in Lebanon.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday that the two-week cease-fire did not include Lebanon, contradicting Prime Minister Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan, who said in a statement that the cease-fire applied everywhere.
After the war with Iran last June, Mr. Netanyahu declared that Israel had achieved a “historic victory” that would “stand for generations.” But following weeks of missile and rocket fire from both Iran and Lebanon, a declining number of Israelis say that they believe the threats from Iran will be significantly reduced or that this latest war will be the last on either front, according to a recent survey.
“We didn’t believe it then, and we don’t believe it now,” said Danielle Leshem, 34, a lawyer in Tel Aviv. She was speaking after her neighborhood was hit by part of an Iranian missile last month, and before the cease-fire came into force.
Unless the Iranian people “toppled the regime,” she said, it would be a matter of time until Israel was back at war.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
Reporting from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
With a cease-fire announced between the United States and Iran, leaders in Persian Gulf countries are grappling with a troubling new reality.
Politicians, investors and residents in wealthy cities like Dubai and Doha once believed they were essentially immune to the region’s conflicts. The American-Israeli war with Iran has smashed that assumption.
Gulf countries must repair the damage caused by thousands of Iranian missiles and drones. Most expect their economic output to shrink this year because of disruptions to their energy exports.
But they are also being forced to re-evaluate their relationships with Israel, Iran and the United States — their main security guarantor — now that the war has exposed the vulnerability of their oil fields, water desalination plants, hotels and airports.
“All that we have with the U.S. today does not provide the guarantee we need now,” said Abdulaziz Sager, chairman of the Gulf Research Center, a think tank in Saudi Arabia. “Will that stop any attack against us? No.”
Governments wishing for a viable alternative guarantor, however, may find that there is none. And if the cease-fire becomes a more durable end to the war, they could be left to face a weakened Iran that can still periodically attack them.
“This idea that you’re going to be left with a bruised, battered, angry but emboldened Iran — I think that’s a real concern,” said Dina Esfandiary, the Middle East geoeconomics lead for Bloomberg Economics.
Iran’s retaliatory attacks hit Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, all countries that host U.S. military bases or personnel. Executives in those nations are uncertain about the security of their businesses and their employees. Families who left in a rush after the war began on Feb. 28 are considering when, or if, to come back.
And the fate of the Strait of Hormuz — the waterway, vital to the global economy, that Gulf countries need to export their gas and oil — remains up in the air.
In recent weeks, Iran appeared to be operating a de facto toll system for vessels to pass through the strait, Bloomberg News reported. If that scenario outlasts the war, it will be a nightmare for many Gulf nations, putting their export revenues at the mercy of Iran.
“In truth, one of the most significant outcomes of this war is the shattering of the concept of a regional security system in the Gulf,” Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for Qatar’s foreign ministry, told reporters on March 24. “The security framework in the Gulf was based on certain axioms. Many of these axioms have been bypassed.”
Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, welcomed the cease-fire announcement on Wednesday, while warning that further work was required to protect the region’s security.
“For now the world has stepped back from disaster,” Mr. Albusaidi wrote on social media. “But there’s no room for complacency. Serious negotiations now required for lasting peace.”
A senior Emirati official, Anwar Gargash, sounded a patriotic and celebratory note, saying that the Emirates had “triumphed in a war we sincerely sought to avoid.”
“Today, we move forward to manage a complex regional landscape with greater leverage, sharper insight and a more solid capacity to influence and shape the future,” Mr. Gargash, a diplomatic adviser to the Emirati president, wrote on social media.
Yet Gulf countries were still sounding scattered alarms warning of incoming attacks early on Wednesday, adding to skepticism about whether the cease-fire would endure. Bahrain’s interior ministry reported a fire caused by “Iranian aggression.” It said the fire had been extinguished without injuries. And Kuwait’s army reported “an intense wave of hostile Iranian attacks,” including 28 drones, that had been intercepted since 8 a.m. local time on Wednesday — hours after the cease-fire.
“This is a cease-fire plan that does not seem to include the Gulf in consultation,” Mahdi Jasim Ghuloom, a Bahrain political analyst, wrote on social media. “Clearly this will make it more fragile, and Iran has continued attacking some Gulf countries this morning despite the announcement.”
Whatever happens, the region’s royal families will have to reckon with newly apparent limits to their ability to steer Washington’s decision-making in the region, despite the personal ties they have cultivated with President Trump and his family.
“We suffer in the Gulf because he started the war,” Mr. Sager of the Gulf Research Center said. “We told him the consequences. We were never consulted.”
The Gulf countries will also have to decide how to deal with Iran. Saudi Arabia and the Emirates had sought warmer ties with the Islamic republic in recent years, trying to reduce the threat it posed them. Some officials look back at that decision with bitterness.
“When this war eventually ends, in order for there to be any rebuilding of trust will take a long time,” Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, told reporters on March 19.
Different Gulf governments are likely to adopt different stances, which could deepen cleavages in the region. The feud between the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, for example, which was interrupted when both were under attack by Iran, could soon pick up where it left off.
Ismaeel Naar contributed reporting from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Read the full story at nyt News.
Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Nvidia lead tech rally after Trump announces ceasefire with Iran
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/8/2026, 8:01:05 PM
U.S. stocks soared on Wednesday after President Donald Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran, and beaten-down tech names shared in the rally.
Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Nvidia led the way among the Magnificent 7 names.
Chipmakers also soared, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. gaining 7% and ASML, Applied Materials and Micron popping 9%.
Trump backed down from his Tuesday threat that "a whole civilization will die" shortly before his 8 p.m. ET deadline and said that the U.S. would pause fighting. He said the U.S. had received a proposal from Iran and the two sides would continue to negotiate.
Despite the truce, ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has yet to return to pre-war levels and Saudi Arabia's east-west pipeline was hit by a drone hours after Trump's Truth Social post.
Gas Prices Won’t Quickly Return to Prewar Levels, Even if the Strait of Hormuz Reopens
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/8/2026, 7:57:25 PM
in these structures is an
essential processing step
visible after missile strike
in these structures is an
essential processing step
Rebecca Elliott reported from Houston and New York, and Ivan Penn from Los Angeles.
Reopening the Strait of Hormuz — a central aim for the United States when it agreed to a cease-fire with Iran — would be the first step toward getting more energy flowing through the Persian Gulf.
That is because dozens of refineries, storage facilities, and oil and gas fields in at least nine countries, from Iran to the United Arab Emirates and beyond, have been targeted in strikes. All told, 10 percent or more of the world’s oil supply has been turned off. Restarting those operations will require not only safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, but also inspecting pumps, replacing bespoke processing equipment and recalling employees and ships that have scattered across the globe.
“It’s not a case of you just flick a switch and everything’s back up again,” said Martin Houston, a longtime oil and gas executive who now serves as board member for several energy companies.
The timeline for bringing the Gulf energy system back to some semblance of normal is highly uncertain. For one thing, the war has been paused for only two weeks.
In the cease-fire deal, which President Trump announced on Tuesday evening, Iran agreed to allow ships to pass through the strait without being attacked. Earlier that day, Mr. Trump said that if the waterway remained closed, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” He has also repeatedly threatened to strike Iranian power plants and other critical infrastructure if Iran does not allow vessels to pass through the strait — acts that could be considered war crimes.
Attacks on energy facilities continued in the days leading up to the cease-fire, including on an oil refinery in Kuwait and petrochemical complexes in Iran. How much damage has already been done to the region’s infrastructure is difficult to know because many countries have shared little information.
Once companies regain confidence that their ships can transit the narrow waterway that runs between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, the first order of business is likely to be shipping out the oil and other fuels that countries close to the strait stockpiled in storage tanks. Then, as long as hostilities do not resume, some wells are likely to flow again within days or weeks, industry analysts and Gulf oil executives say.
But a fuller recovery will be a monthslong process, they cautioned. And even then, some infrastructure that has sustained extensive damage is expected to take years to repair.
For consumers, this means that gasoline prices at the pump — which recently topped $4 a gallon, on average, in the United States — are unlikely to return to their prewar levels any time soon, even though international oil prices fell considerably late Tuesday. Countries are using up stores of energy they had before the war, so the longer the war drags on, the stickier those high prices are likely to be.
The shuttering of oil wells has other consequences. Once idled, oil and gas wells can be difficult to restart, and the longer they remain closed, the more trouble companies may have turning them back on.
The pressure underground can get out of whack while wells are closed; water can build up. If the shutdowns last a long time, equipment might corrode after being exposed to hydrogen sulfide for too long. The toxic gas, which smells like rotten eggs, is often found mixed in with oil and natural gas. Saudi Arabia and Iraq inject gas or water into many of their wells to coax out more oil, adding another layer of complexity to re-establishing the correct pressure when the time comes to reopen, the research firm BloombergNEF wrote recently.
Kuwait, which is sandwiched between Saudi Arabia and Iraq at the tip of the Persian Gulf, is the world’s 10th-largest oil producer. Before Friday, when its Mina al-Ahmadi refinery was hit by a drone, the chief executive of the state-owned oil company Kuwait Petroleum said he expected to be able to “bring out quite a bit of production immediately, within a few days” of the war’s ending. Sheikh Nawaf Al Sabah, the chief executive, added during remarks late last month at an energy conference, CERAWeek by S&P Global, in Houston that “the full production will come within three or four months.”
The big question is how much damage has been sustained by all the infrastructure needed to get oil and gas from wellheads to world markets. Analysts say few installations appear to have suffered catastrophic harm, but they are working with limited information about most facilities.
One of the most important energy assets in the region is Qatar’s natural-gas export plant, Ras Laffan. The site, which spans at least three square miles in a large industrial city, supplies countries throughout Asia and Europe with natural gas that people use for cooking, heating homes and generating electricity.
Before it can be loaded on a ship, natural gas must be turned into a liquid by cooling it at about minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 162 degrees Celsius). Qatar stopped making this liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., during the early days of the war. Missiles later took out 17 percent of the site’s capacity.
The undamaged parts of the facility would be restarted first, likely over a period of weeks or months. Steps include reopening the offshore gas wells that feed the export terminal; restarting any utilities that had been turned off; restocking the inventory of fuels used to cool the gas, known as refrigerants; and then actually cooling the gas, said Mehdy Touil, who spent more than a decade at Ras Laffan and is now the lead L.N.G. specialist at Calypso Commodities, a Berlin company.
The damaged portions are another matter. QatarEnergy, which operates Ras Laffan, has said it will take several years to repair those areas and bring them online. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.) Ras Laffan has 14 L.N.G.-producing units. The strikes last month took out the heart of two of them — the mammoth structures in which gas is cooled — QatarEnergy’s chief executive told Reuters. That equipment can be as tall as an 18-story building, and the lead time for a new one can run two years or more, industry officials said.
“These facilities were custom‑engineered and integrated into the broader Ras Laffan complex, making them substantially more difficult to replace” than simpler kinds of energy infrastructure, said Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of engineering at the University of Southern California.
Less is known about the extent of the damage to oil-processing facilities throughout the region. A refinery on the west coast of Saudi Arabia had been operating at much lower levels after a drone strike in mid-March, according to Rystad Energy, an Oslo-based consulting firm. Rystad estimated that the refinery most likely could be fully restored within a year.
Iran has also suffered attacks on its energy infrastructure, including strikes on oil depots in Tehran that turned the sky over the capital city black.
One concern for rebuilding is that supply chains for some specialized parts have already been stretched thin. The rush to build data centers for artificial intelligence has created a demand for gas-fired power plants and other energy infrastructure. Many of those facilities rely on equipment, like gas turbines, that may also be needed to make repairs in the Gulf.
“If you have the right supply chain, you can get things built back pretty quickly,” said Mike Stice, a University of Oklahoma professor who serves on the board of energy companies including the U.S. refining giant Marathon Petroleum. But, he added, timelines will depend a lot on what has been damaged. “All it takes is one critical piece of equipment that has a two-year delivery date.”
In the end, however the conflict plays out, analysts expect energy prices to eventually fall from wartime levels, but remain higher than they would have been in the absence of war.
Analysts at the French bank Société Générale recently said they expected oil to trade around $80 a barrel at the end of 2026, up from their earlier forecast of $65. Traders will be pricing in a greater risk of geopolitical disruption in the future.
Rebecca F. Elliott covers energy for The Times.
Ivan Penn is a reporter based in Los Angeles and covers the energy industry. His work has included reporting on clean energy, failures in the electric grid and the economics of utility services.
Read the full story at nyt News.
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