Status of U.S., Iran ceasefire in limbo as Strait of Hormuz remains unopened

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Trump and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte held a closed-door meeting this afternoon in Washington for discussions that were expected to focus on the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump has suggested the U.S. May leave the trans-Atlantic alliance in recent days after NATO countries ignored his calls to help reopen the strait. 

In an interview with CNN after the meeting, Rutte said he told Trump he understood his disappointment, but that the majority of NATO countries support the president’s goal of degrading Iran’s nuclear capabilities. 

The White House did not immediately offer an update on the conversation. But earlier today, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged that Trump had discussed leaving NATO.

Hormuz crisis a ticking time bomb for food security, IRC representative says

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) says the near-total blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is worsening already strained food security in the region. Ciarán Donnelly, the IRC's senior vice president of international programs, says the knock-on effects are also being felt globally in humanitarian aid.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has not only restricted the global flow of oil, but also disrupted the delivery and raised the cost of humanitarian aid over the past 5½ weeks. Ciarán Donnelly, the senior vice-president of international programs at the International Rescue Committee, said it's possible that food insecurity in exceedingly vulnerable countries could deteriorate into famine or famine-like conditions if the waterway stays closed.

"So the ongoing impact of this crisis, in humanitarian crises and conflicts around the world, is going to continue to be felt for some weeks to come. If peace doesn't hold and if it's not expanded to Lebanon, we'll see the impact on people's lives continue to worsen."

Reuters

Lebanon's civil defence service says a total of 254 people were killed and more than 1,100 wounded across the country by the Israeli strikes. The highest toll was in Beirut, where 91 people were killed, it said. 

That's significantly higher than the number given by the country's health ministry, though it said its count of 182 dead was not a final ​figure.

Wall Street rallied today, buoyed by the news of the two-week ceasefire that sent the price of Brent crude oil sinking below $97 US. 

By the end of the trading day, the S&P 500 jumped 2.5 per cent, the Dow Jones was up 1,325 points and the Nasdaq Composite rose 2.8 per cent — a show of optimism from investors after weeks of volatility across global financial markets.

The Associated Press

Lebanon's health ministry said Israeli airstrikes today killed 182 people, the highest single-day death toll in the Israel-Hezbollah war.

Another 890 people were wounded in the strikes, the ministry said, as Israel launched a barrage of strikes on central Beirut and elsewhere in the country. 

Altogether, 1,739 people have been reported killed and 5,873 wounded in Lebanon in just over five weeks since the outbreak of the war.

Trump says countries supplying Iran with weapons will face immediate 50 per cent tariffs. 

Without naming any specific countries, Trump said nations providing weapons to Iran "will be immediately tariffed, on any and all goods sold to the United States of America, 50%, effective immediately," Trump ​wrote on his Truth Social site. 

"There will be no exclusions or exemptions!"

China and Russia are known to have helped Iran build military capacity, supplying equipment such as missiles and air-defence ⁠systems. 

One reporter asked Vance about the president's threat to wipe out Iranian civilization and why that "kind of language is useful in this kind of scenario."

"The president of the United States is saying that, unless the Iranians do the right thing, it's going to have some serious consequences for the regime," Vance responded in part. 

"We obviously don't want the people of Iran to suffer, but we have a lot of leverage the president of the United States can use and it's why I think it's so important for the Iranians to be negotiators in good faith."

Later, he said: "If they don't give us what we need, then I think it's going to be bad, but I'm optimistic the Iranians are going to be smart and that they're going to negotiate in good faith."

Vance said Iran is "promising to reopen" the Strait of Hormuz and told reporters he's "seeing signs" of that shift, but did not specify a timeline for when he expects the passage to be fully open. He said the agreement won't hold if the waterway stays closed but, again, did not provide a timeline for how long Iran has to allow ships to pass through.

"The president's been very clear: The deal is a ceasefire, a negotiation. That's what we give. What they give is that the strait is going to be reopening. If we don't see that happening, the president is not going to abide by our terms."

Vance repeated the Trump administration's stance that the ceasefire does not include Lebanon, a point on which the U.S. And Iran disagree.

"I actually think ... This comes from a legitimate misunderstanding. I think the Iranians thought that the ceasefire included Lebanon and it just didn't. We never made that promise, we never indicated that was going to be the case," said Vance, speaking to reporters before leaving Budapest tonight. 

"What we said is the ceasefire was going to be focused on Iran and the ceasefire would be focused on America's allies, both Israel and the Gulf Arab states." 

"The Israelis, as I understand it ... Have actually offered, frankly, to check themselves a little bit in Lebanon because they want to make sure our negotiation is successful. That's not because that's part of the ceasefire. I think that's the Israelis trying to set us up for success."

Christopher Stokes, Doctors Without Borders' co-ordinator in Lebanon, says the people in the country woke up today with a sense of hope after the U.S. And Iran agreed to a temporary ceasefire.

Then more bombs started falling.

Stokes says he could hear the blasts and see the smoke from his office in Beirut. Soon after, he and his teams were deployed to hospitals around the city, and he saw the bloody aftermath of the explosions.

"We had a large number of injured arriving, patients with dismembered limbs. We even had a seven-year-old child this morning who'd lost six members of her family," he said.

Israel says its strikes targeted Hezbollah command centres. But Stokes says they are hitting densely populated areas.

"People are just going in the street in their ordinary business and then the building behind them is blown up, and they're taken out," he said.

Trump told PBS the strikes are a "separate skirmish" from the U.S. War in Iran. 

It's not a word Stokes would use. 

"There's no way that we could call this a skirmish. It's really a war with the Lebanese civilians at its centre," he said.

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