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Middle East crisis live: Lebanon’s president refuses to meet Netanyahu until war ends

The latest eruption of hostilities between Iran and Israel appears to have been contained for now after Donald Trump insisted he called “all the shots” in the Middle East, but in a dangerously fragile region Benjamin Netanyahu has again shown he is ready to take shots of his own. The exchange of missiles on Sunday and Monday was ample demonstration of the inherent instability of the current limbo between war and peace, but it also shone a bright light on the complex and conflicted relationship between the US president and the Israeli prime minister, frenemies who could determine the fate of the current ceasefire. More here:

Israel and Iran step back from renewed conflict after Trump calls for halt

Fears of a return to a full-scale regional war in the Middle East eased on Monday as Israel and Iran said they had halted attacks on each other after an appeal from Donald Trump to “immediately stop shooting”. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, acknowledged the halt in fighting with Iran in a televised speech, but vowed to respond “with force” to future attacks. “At present, the fire on this front has been halted, because after the terrorist regime in Tehran was struck, it stopped attacking us,” Netanyahu said. “If that terrorist regime makes the mistake of attacking us again, we will respond with force.” The recent wave of Iranian ballistic missile attacks on Israel and retaliatory strikes by Israeli warplanes on Iran marked the most direct confrontation since an April ceasefire. Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi rebels also fired at Israel and warned they would target Israeli-affiliated ships in the Red Sea, further escalating tension. Any new “ceasefire within the ceasefire” is very fragile, analysts say, with multiple flashpoints that could lead to fresh exchanges of strikes and missile barrages at any moment. Israeli officials have rejected repeated Iranian efforts to link any definitive ceasefire to Israel stopping its offensive in Lebanon against Hezbollah, which has close ties with Tehran. On Monday, Israel’s defence minister said Israel would continue to operate against Hezbollah in Lebanon and strike Beirut if the militant Islamist movement attacked Israel. “Any Iranian attempt to link Lebanon and Iran and attack Israel will be met with great force, as happened yesterday,” Israel Katz said. Israel’s attacks on the southern suburbs of Beirut, a stronghold of Hezbollah, triggered Iran’s missile barrages on Sunday. Iran also remained defiant. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliamentary speaker and most senior negotiator, said on Monday that Tehran would not tolerate what it called “repeated violation”. “So long as you lack a genuine willingness to build trust, Iran’s response will remain the same,” he posted on X. Trump has leaned on Israel to stop its attacks in Lebanon to allow room for a deal to end the wider war with Iran, including an obscenities-filled rebuke of Netanyahu in a phone call last week. However, the Israeli prime minister faces an election later this year and is under domestic pressure to continue efforts to degrade Hezbollah’s ability to attack Israel. On Monday, there were reports of new launches of rockets by Hezbollah – which has been armed and funded by Iran for decades – into northern Israel, and of a strike by Israel near Tyre in southern Lebanon. Israel’s recent attacks on Iran included a strike on an Iranian petrochemical complex. The Israeli military said it had also struck and dismantled Iran’s defence systems deployed across several areas in the country. Iranian state television reported the sound of explosions in Isfahan, Karaj, Tabriz and Tehran. Iran’s military headquarters said it had “delivered a painful response” to Israel for its attacks on Lebanon, including Sunday’s strikes on the outskirts of Beirut. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it had targeted two military bases in Israel. An Iranian missile fragment caused damage to several homes in a West Bank settlement, but no injuries were reported. The sudden surge of violence shook financial markets, sending oil prices up 5% and threatening further price rises for fuel around the world. Stocks rose when both sides appeared to agree to halt the exchanges for now. The new violence has also complicated Trump’s push to end the war, launched by the US and Israel on 28 February with strikes that killed the then supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A ceasefire announced two months ago paused all-out warfare though sporadic clashes in the Gulf have continued. In one of a flurry of social media posts, Trump on Monday said Israel and Iran both wanted “an immediate CEASEFIRE! Final negotiations on ‘Peace’ are proceeding, subject to ignorance or stupidity getting in its way.” He added that a US blockade of Iranian ports would remain in place until a final deal was reached. Esmail Baghaei, a Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, said Tehran was exchanging messages with Washington in an atmosphere of “extreme suspicion”. Israel’s actions in Lebanon, whether carried out with US knowledge and consent or not, had been aimed at sabotaging diplomacy, he added. “No one believes that the Zionist regime would carry out any action without prior coordination and cooperation with the United States … It is perfectly natural that the diplomatic process initiated to put an end to this imposed war would be affected,” he said. Iran also threatened to expand the conflict further, with potentially disastrous consequences for the world economy. The Houthis, the Yemen-based militia movement with close ties to Tehran, pledged in a statement to stop Israel’s maritime navigation in the Red Sea, and said they had also fired missiles at Israel in recent days. The Houthis have so far largely stayed out of the regional war. They control the mouth of the Red Sea, which has gained significance as an alternative route for millions of barrels a day of Middle East oil otherwise blocked by Iran’s closure to most shipping of the strait of Hormuz. Fifteen people were injured across Iran in the latest Israeli attacks – 14 of them in Mahshahr county – but no deaths had been reported, Iran’s national emergency organisation said. The Israeli ambulance service said no casualties had been reported from the missile launches toward Israel. Israel invaded Lebanon in March after Hezbollah fired across the border in solidarity with Tehran at the beginning of the current war. More than 3,500 people have been killed by Israeli strikes in Lebanon, while Hezbollah has killed at least 29 Israeli soldiers in Lebanon and three Israeli civilians. Iran’s negotiating demands include a ceasefire in Lebanon and the withdrawal of Israel forces, the unfreezing of half of Iran’s frozen overseas assets and a form of Iranian management over the strait of Hormuz, which before the war carried a fifth of the world’s crude oil and liquefied natural gas. Tehran also wants to postpone any detailed discussions about how Iran might assure the US it is not seeking a nuclear weapon, such as by down-blending its highly enriched uranium stockpile. Iranian negotiators have been under internal pressure from a small but vocal group of hardliners in the parliament to abandon the talks altogether. Others claim specific aspects of the deal are too ambiguous and need to be tightened. Danny Orbach, a military historian at Israel’s Hebrew University, said that, in launching the strikes, Israel had sent a message to Washington that no final agreement with Iran could be reached if Israel’s interests were ignored. “Because if it tramples too heavily on Israeli interests, Israel can overturn the table,” Orbach said.

‘Wasn’t even good’: US tourist says she was charged €44 for two ice creams in Rome

A US tourist has warned visitors to Rome after paying €44 (£38) for two ice-creams in the Italian capital. Nicole Ann, from Florida, advised fellow tourists to “avoid Don Nino”, an ice-cream parlour on a street off Piazza Navona. She claimed she had ordered two small cups of ice-cream but instead was charged for two large cones topped with trimmings that were allegedly not requested, including macarons, cannoli and panna (whipped cream). Sharing a photograph of the receipt, dated 3 June, on the page of a Facebook group offering Rome travel tips, Nicole Ann wrote: “We stopped for gelato and asked for 2 small cups” but the server “gave us the smallest-sized cup and said we had 3 scoops” and then “started adding toppings we didn’t ask for – like cannoli and macarons, implying it was free”. Nicole Ann said she had not even realised the bill was €44 until looking back at the receipt, because “it sounded like” the server had said €14. She said the ice-cream “wasn’t even good”, describing it as the “worst” of all those she sampled during her 10 days in Rome. Nicole Ann claimed she had ordered two small cups, and that her purchase was served in cups. The receipt listed two maxi cones at €12 each, €4 for dollops of panna on the ice-creams, two pistachio cannoli for €10 and two macarons totalling €6 – bringing the total to €44. Don Nino has several branches in central Rome, with its main one opposite the Spanish Steps. The company, whose website describes its ice-cream products as “the authentic taste of quality”, declined to comment when contacted by the Guardian. Nicole Ann’s post sparked more than 900 comments from Italians and foreign tourists. “As an Italian living in Italy, I’m ashamed,” wrote one commenter. Another questioned whether Nicole Ann had checked the prices before ordering. In response, she claimed she “didn’t see prices anywhere” and, after eating plenty of ice-cream during her trip, assumed the cost would be similar. The Guardian visited the Don Nino shop near Piazza Navona and the price list was clearly visible, with one scoop in a small cup or cone costing €6, doubling to €12 for three scoops in a large cup or cone. The typical price of an ice-cream in Rome is about €2-€5, depending on the size and location in the city.

France and Germany abandon joint project to build European fighter jet

France and Germany have concluded that the companies involved in building a joint fighter jet will not be able to reach an agreement and have abandoned the project, officials in Berlin have said in a blow to Europe’s common defence efforts. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, had “reached the shared assessment that the companies will not be able to come together”, an official told Agence France-Presse. “They acknowledge this reality.” Macron and Merz’s predecessor, Angela Merkel, launched the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) in 2017 to replace France’s Rafale jets and the Eurofighter used by Germany and Spain by about 2040. But the €100bn project has been dogged by disagreements between the companies involved – France’s Dassault Aviation and the European aerospace group Airbus, representing German and Spanish interests – over leadership and control of the development programme. Dassault reportedly insisted on being the lead partner in the jet’s development in order to protect its intellectual property, while Airbus pushed for a more equal partnership involving significant technology transfers. Paris and Berlin were also understood to be at loggerheads over the type of jet, with France seeking a single European model but Germany saying its needs were not the same because French planes needed to carry nuclear weapons and land on aircraft carriers. Merz has previously openly questioned whether developing a crewed sixth-generation fighter jet still makes sense for his country’s air force, and has said EU member states do not all have the same military hardware requirements. The abandonment of the FCAS project is a heavy blow to efforts by European countries to cooperate more closely on defence, after decades of underinvestment and faced with a hostile Russia and an increasingly unreliable US. The programme includes the jet fighter at the heart of the disagreement, but also drones and a high-security combat data cloud. European sources told Reuters it was possible the development of the latter two elements could continue. A German government source also told AFP: “The actual core of FCAS is to be continued as a European system,” describing it as a “nervous system that networks aircraft, drones and other components into an integrated whole”. Macron’s office did not immediately comment. With French elections scheduled for next year, Paris is understood to see some form of positive outcome from one of the outgoing president’s landmark projects as important. German government sources said Merz and Macron had discussed the decision to announce an end to the troubled project on Friday on the sidelines of a summit between EU and western Balkans leaders in Montenegro. Both had previously tried unsuccessfully to persuade Airbus and Dassault to reach agreement, but despite last-ditch efforts to salvage the project and public declarations by both leaders that they were determined for it to succeed, the rift between Paris and Berlin had become increasingly clear in recent months. Two mediators, one from each country, were tasked in March with coming up with proposals to rescue the initiative but were unable to do so, while the head of Dassault insisted the company could handle the project alone and did not want it to be “co-managed”. There was no immediate comment on Monday from Dassault or Airbus.

Iran war: who is fighting and why?

Israel and Iran have returned to active war for the first time since a ceasefire was agreed two months ago in an exchange of rocket fire that threatened efforts to end the conflict. Donald Trump, who started the war in February alongside Israel but has since attempted to present himself as a mediator, told the two sides to stop shooting and said “final negotiations” on peace were proceeding. By late afternoon on Monday, the attacks had stopped. Why did the regional arch-enemies start firing at each other again, and what has been happening with broader peace efforts? How did the war start? Trump launched the war on 28 February in partnership with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The conflict quickly spiralled out of the US president’s control, causing regional destabilisation and a global economic shock. Tehran’s effective closure of the vital strait of Hormuz disrupted energy markets and made many basic products, including food, more expensive. Despite killing the top layer of Iranian leadership on day one, including the late supreme leader Ali Khamenei, a new guard was swiftly appointed. Is there a ceasefire in place? A ceasefire was agreed on 8 April, but it is not a permanent end to the conflict. Key issues are unresolved, including the freedom of passage for ships in the Gulf, restraining Israel from attacking its neighbours, checks on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the lifting of sanctions on Tehran. Iran says its nuclear programme is solely for generating electricity, but many governments want clear and enforceable agreements to prevent Tehran from ever making an atomic weapon. Trump ripped up an Obama-era nuclear deal but has not agreed a new version. Why did Israel and Iran start fighting again? Each side will have a version of “who started it”, but the key moment in the recent violence was Israel launching strikes on Beirut early on Sunday. Tehran had said last week that it would consider any Israeli attack on the Lebanese capital a violation of the US-Iran ceasefire and would respond by attacking Israel, which it has since done. Hasn’t fighting continued in Israel and Lebanon through the past few months? Yes. The US, Israel and Iran stopped bombing each other in April, but Israel has continued to attack its northern neighbour and Hezbollah has continued to fire drones and rockets at Israel. Hezbollah joined the war in March when it fired rockets at Israel in support of Iran, after which Israel launched an intensive bombing campaign across Lebanon. How does Lebanon play into the US-Israel war on Iran? Israel has repeatedly invaded and occupied Lebanon over the past decades, and there is an influential political movement in Israel calling for the permanent seizure of Lebanese territory. Israel’s war on Lebanon has also been highly destructive, leading to a humanitarian crisis that has shocked governments around the world. More than a million people – a fifth of Lebanon’s population – have been displaced, and Israeli strikes have killed at least 3,613 people. Hezbollah has killed at least 30 Israeli soldiers in Lebanon and three Israeli civilians. Tehran insists Lebanon be included in a broader ceasefire deal, something Israel and the US have rejected. Trump told NBC News on Sunday that he was not demanding that Lebanon be part of any peace deal with Iran. Is there a separate ceasefire in Lebanon? Sort of. The Lebanese and Israeli governments have been negotiating directly in Washington and have agreed to a ceasefire. But the deal lacks teeth because it is Hezbollah, not the Lebanese army, that is launching attacks on Israel, and the group has rejected the US-brokered truce. The Lebanese government has been trying to reassert control over parts of the country where Hezbollah is strong and to eventually disarm the group. Hezbollah says it needs its weapons to prevent Israeli aggression.

‘Senior lieutenant’ in Kinahan criminal cartel jailed for 24 years by Dublin court

A leader of the notorious Kinahan criminal cartel has been sentenced to 24 years in prison at a Dublin court. Sean McGovern, 40, who has been described as a senior lieutenant in the group, pleaded guilty to two charges of directing the activities of a criminal organisation relating to a deadly feud between the Kinahan and Hutch criminal gangs. McGovern, who was extradited from the United Arab Emirates to face trial in Ireland, had been shot in the feud, the court heard. The charges related to his involvement in the lead-up to the murder of Noel Kirwan, a grandfather who was shot dead in December 2016, and the targeting and monitoring of James Gately with a view to a shooting, which did not take place. Last month a sentencing hearing was told that McGovern wanted to apologise for the hurt as a consequence of his actions. At the special criminal court in Dublin on Monday, the three-judge panel sentenced him to 24 years – backdated to his arrest in Dubai on an Interpol red notice in October 2024. After considering mitigating factors including an early plea, Mr Justice McGrath said the sentences for the separate offences should run consecutively. McGovern was sentenced to 10 years for his role in directing activities relating to the planned murder of Gately and 14 years for his role in the lead-up to the killing of Kirwan. McGrath said the court had established that McGovern was a senior member of the Kinahan gang and was a “confidant of those in the higher echelons” in the organisation, who placed a “high degree of trust and competence” in him. The judge said the Kinahan gang was a “particularly large, well-organised sinister and dangerous organisation”. He said the court had no doubt that McGovern, holding a relatively senior position of the gang, was fully aware of its identity, structure and nature. McGrath said: “Mr McGovern knew in each instance he was directing preparations for murder and did so intentionally.” Det Supt Dave Gallagher said the sentencing should be a “lesson to those who glorify organised crime and promote it as a way of life”. He said it was “significant in holding to account a key person who was engaged in directing the activities of a violent criminal organisation engaged in a campaign of ruthless murder and violence which impacted so negatively on our communities and Ireland’s national reputation.” Speaking of McGovern’s victim, Gallagher said: “I wish to pay tribute to the Kirwan family, whose innocent father, Noel, was brutally murdered, for no other reason except to portray power in the criminal underworld, by Sean McGovern, working with and directing others, who believed they were untouchable.” He added: “There are no untouchables, and law enforcement is committed to the pursuit and prosecution of those who are the leaders, the decision-makers and the facilitators. The UAE has become a base for Irish criminals and their associates partly because the state has no extradition treaty with the EU. But after a decade of lobbying by Irish officials, an extradition treaty became operational last May. It was not retrospective and did not apply to McGovern, but authorities in both jurisdictions made a separate, one-off arrangement to transfer the suspect. McGovern was shot in the stomach in 2016 when a rival gang’s hit team stormed a Kinahan-organised boxing weigh-in at a Dublin hotel.

Will Iran give up on ceasefire talks as strait of Hormuz blockade continues?

Iran’s reversion to large-scale military exchanges with Israel broadened the conflict that began in February not only by making the Israeli attacks on Hezbollah a direct casus belli for Iran for the first time, but also by drawing the Houthis in Yemen back into the conflict with as yet incalculable consequences. Some in Tehran, buoyed up by past perceived military success and emboldened by the chokehold of the strait of Hormuz, would like to turn this moment into the point of no return in the conflagration with Israel. A minority would welcome the abandonment of ceasefire talks with the US, an outcome for which they have been agitating for weeks. But even now there are other voices in Tehran that believe Iran can instead exploit the tensions between Israel and the US to accelerate a deal from a US president desperate to extricate himself from a war that is turning into an alarming show of American diplomatic and military impotence. Donald Trump’s social media post urging Iran and Israel to stop firing at each other did not reek of a man in control of events. Iran’s decision to announce it was ending its operations so long as there were no further Israeli attacks shows the advocates of all-out war are in the minority. There are many such as Hesamodin Ashna, an adviser to the former Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, who argued in a speech this weekend that social cohesion and trust inside Iran were still fragile. This camp says the return of Iran’s frozen assets and the gradual lifting of US sanctions are imperative to rescue the Iranian economy from near-collapse, arguing that the economic situation was the incubator for the protests in January. Esmail Baghaei, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, was forced to ride both horses at his weekly press conference in Tehran. At one point he challenged the whole idea that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had mounted the attacks on Iran in defiance of Trump, but then suggested it was possible that Israel was trying to sabotage talks with the US since it feared the terms of the deal would weaken it. Baghaei was careful to insist that the dialogue with the US, conducted indirectly via Pakistan, was continuing and had not been suspended. He was adamant the US was involved in the strikes, saying: “No one in our region believes that an action by the Zionist regime would be taken without prior coordination and cooperation from the United States.” He continued: “The US state department clearly stated during the 40-day war that the reason for this country’s imposition of war on Iran was its support for the Zionist regime, and now, despite the claims of American officials, we know that Centcom [US Central Command] cooperates and coordinates with the Zionist regime in the areas of defence and offence.” At other points he was more circumspect, saying it was possible to debate whether Israel acted independently of the US, or was “riding the US”. In either event Baghaei cautioned all Iran’s allied groups in the region against premature disarmament by drawing a comparison with Jean de La Fontaine’s The Lion in Love, a fable about a lion who, blinded by love, agreed to clip his claws only to be mauled by his enemies. Few doubt Iran’s propensity to bare its claws, and now as a matter almost of strategic doctrine to try always to respond by not just threatening but imposing escalation. For instance, Hassan Ahmadian, one of Iran’s most frequent commenters in Arab media, warned: “The era of strategic patience has ended, and there is no turning back. Iran and its allies are determined to impose and solidify new rules of engagement against their adversary – and I do not see them backing down. For retreat in the face of those who practice genocide will only unleash annihilation across the length and breadth of the region. Resistance, on the other hand, is the only civilized response that holds any meaning against them.” The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it was prepared to target Gulf state energy installations. “In the event of continued attacks toward energy infrastructure all oil and gas facilities associated with Israel, the United States and their allies, including regional energy facilities, will be a target for the armed forces of Iran.” Iran’s negotiating demands have been remarkably consistent: a ceasefire in Lebanon including the withdrawal of Israel forces and the unfreezing of half of Iran’s frozen assets, about $12bn; a form of Iranian management over the strait of Hormuz; and detailed discussions later about how Tehran assures the US it is not seeking a nuclear weapon, including the down-blending of its highly enriched uranium stockpile. Trump has been very close to agreeing these terms, but is trying to find ways to phrase them to make them more palatable to his domestic audience. That is because on balance, the battle of blockades in the strait of Hormuz is trending in Iran’s favour. World oil inventories slowly running out, crashing the global economy from Japan to Brazil, seems more dangerous than Iran running out of cash and oil exports. The democratic west’s capacity to absorb economic pain does not match that of the Iranian regime. The intervention by the Houthis tips the scale further in Iran’s direction. The precise impact will depend on whether the Houthis decide to expand the announced blockade, currently confined to Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, into a broader blockade of hostile shipping. The Bab al-Mandab strait connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden has acted as a crucial relief valve for oil exporters. Saudi Arabia oil flows surged through its east-west pipeline after Hormuz closed, redirecting millions of barrels a day to the Red Sea. The Houthis have not said they would block this flow, but this could change. The Red Sea route is responsible for 15% of global naval shipping trade and the strait of Hormuz about 20%. The simultaneous full closure of both waterways would put huge pressure on the Cape of Good Hope route around South Africa. The Houthis started blockading ships in the Red Sea heading for Israeli ports from November 2013, leading to the bankruptcy of the Israeli port of Eilat. The number of ships going through the Suez canal more than halved in 2024, leading to a massive decline in revenues for the canal and Egypt. The Houthis, involved in behind-the-scenes peace talks with Saudi Arabia about ending the Yemen civil war, have not relished rejoining the conflict, partly because they suffered such serious blows to their command structure last year. The movement now faces a choice of mounting the blockade or waiting for a lead from Iran.