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Middle East crisis live: Trump threatens US will hit Iran ‘hard again tonight’ after saying truce is over

The new secretary general of the Arab League, Nabil Fahmy, said Israel had blocked him from visiting Ramallah, in what would have been his first foreign visit since taking office this month. The regional bloc’s secretariat was informed by Palestinian authorities “of the Israeli occupation authorities’ rejection of a visit... to the occupied Palestinian territories” to visit Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, Fahmy’s office said in a statement.

Trump gives Zelenskyy vague promise of licence to manufacture Patriot missiles

Donald Trump has told Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Ukraine may be allowed to manufacture Patriot missile interceptors to counter Russian ballistic attacks. It would be a diplomatic coup for Kyiv, which has been struggling to counter Moscow’s increasing missile threat. The US president’s commitment, however, was vaguely framed, and he admitted he had not spoken to the US defence and aerospace companies Lockheed Martin and RTX Corporation (formerly Raytheon) that produce the Patriot system. It also remained unclear how quickly manufacturing of the expensive and complex munitions could be stepped up. Trump, sitting next to the Ukrainian president at the Nato summit in Ankara, Turkey, said: “A little birdie told me this, about the fact that we’ll give them the right to make Patriots. We’ll show them how to do it, it’s very complex actually. But it’s – you’ll figure out the complexity quickly.” He clarified: “We’re going to give a license to you to make Patriots. This way, you can’t complain that we’re not giving them enough. However, in a blow to Ukraine’s air defence capabilities in the short-term, Trump indicated that the US would not be able to supply Ukraine quickly with Patriot interceptors from its own stockpile. “We have Patriots, but we don’t have that many. We need them for ourselves too,” Trump said. There is a global shortage of Patriot interceptors due to the running down of stockpiles by Ukraine and Gulf states caught up the US-Israel war against Iran. They are expensive to produce – at about $3m for a single interceptor – and until very recently the US was producing no more than 60 a month, a figure that has recently increased. Zelenskyy has for years been asking for more of them, and more recently for a license so that Ukraine can manufacture its own. Even at the current increased rate of production it is estimated that the US would not manage to replenish its stockpile for its own use until 2028. All of which makes it extremely unlikely that Ukraine would be able to deploy locally-produced Patriot interceptors any time soon. George Beebe a former senior Russia analyst at the CIA who is now the director of the grand strategy programme at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said the “the US decision to license Ukraine’s production of Patriot … will do little to fix Ukraine’s urgent air defence problems”. He added: “The United States and Europe have no missiles to spare, however. The conflict with Iran has badly depleted US and European stocks of these weapons, and the United States cannot produce them fast enough to meet Ukraine’s needs. “Russia is firing close to 100 ballistic missiles at Ukraine each month, and the pace is intensifying. The US only manufactures about 50 Patriots each month for itself and all its allies and partners. “It will take many months for Ukraine to get a production facility built. But Russia will attack that facility as soon as the first cornerstone is laid, and to have any hope of completing that construction, Ukraine will have to divert many existing Patriot batteries from their current locations to that new facility. “The US should recognise that granting the license to Ukraine is very likely to expose Patriot technology to Russian intelligence collection.” Perhaps more significant was the tenor of Trump’s bilateral meeting with Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the Nato summit, which was much warmer than some previous encounters and includedpraise from Trump for Zelenskyy’s willingness to reach a deal on ending the fighting in Ukraine. He said the Ukrainian president has “done an amazing job” and “been very effective” in the war. “We’ve actually developed a good relationship. It’s hard to believe,” Trump said. He added that he believed a deal on ending the war was on the horizon and that the US would “work on some kind of security package” for Ukraine. Associated Press contributed to this report

Letter: The Rev Malcolm Johnson obituary

I first met the Rev Malcolm Johnson in 1985. He was exceptional – a clergyman who affirmed gay friendships, was deeply committed to his church’s work with homeless people and of deep personal faith. At the time, I was tiptoeing around God, and was astounded when Malcolm told me that Jesus Christ is alive today. The broadsheet papers were generally supportive of Malcolm’s contribution to the 1987 debate at General Synod, and I phoned afterwards to thank him. He replied that it would not have been possible to debate human sexuality at synod even 20 years previously, and while he was prepared to put his head above the parapet he hoped that it wouldn’t be pecked off. My guess is that Malcolm was passed over for senior roles, no matter his suitability for them, colleagues’ respect and the work he had done, because he openly affirmed gay and lesbian people.

Oil prices rise sharply after Iran launches attacks on tankers near strait of Hormuz

Oil markets have recorded their sharpest price rise in nearly two months after a series of attacks on fossil fuel tankers near the strait of Hormuz led Donald Trump to declare that the ceasefire deal with Iran was over. At the same time, UK short-dated bonds suffered their worst day since the end of March as the prospect grew of a Bank of England rate rise to cope with the renewed inflationary pressures. The yield or interest rate on two-year gilts rose 15 basis points to 4.35% with a rate rise in November fully priced in and a 50% chance of another in December. The market gave a 75% chance to one rate increase by the end of the year earlier this week. The FTSE 100 suffered its biggest one day fall since May, down nearly 1.7% at 10,489 on concerns about the impact of the latest increase in tensions on the global economy. But BP, 3.5% better, and Shell, up 2.2%. both bucked the trend as the oil price rose. Brent, the global crude benchmark. jumped by nearly 6% on Wednesday to more than $80 a barrel, the highest price since the US and Iran agreed the ceasefire while negotiating an end to the war last month. The fragile ceasefire appeared to disintegrate after Iran launched attacks on at least three tankers transiting the strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, including a vessel carrying about 8m cubic feet of liquified natural gas, which is considered the cargo most at risk of exploding. At least four oil and gas tankers have turned back from trying to transit the strait, according to ship-tracking data, which has hampered efforts to normalise flows of oil and gas through the vital trade route after months of disruption. Jorge León, the head of geopolitical analysis at Rystad Energy, said: “Tanker traffic through the strait of Hormuz has essentially stopped, which tells you more about risk perception right now than any statement from Washington or Tehran.” The “real test” will come after the burial ceremony of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei later this week, said León, once the US and Iran “show whether there is still an appetite for a diplomatic off-ramp”. Global oil prices have fallen from highs of more than $110 a barrel in late May as more tankers were able to transit the strait amid hopes the US-Iran talks would bring an end to the war which has disrupted flows of about 20m barrels of oil a day from Gulf producers. In Europe, the collapse of the ceasefire reignited a 5% increase in gas market prices. The benchmark Dutch contract increased by more than €2.40 to €49 per megawatt hour (MWh), while the UK equivalent rose by 6p to 116.75p per therm. The return of rising energy prices risks raising household costs which have faced the steepest rise in summer energy bills in four years. If sustained, the higher market costs could mean rising gas and electricity prices in the winter as well as higher prices at the pump. Luke Bosdet, a spokesperson for the AA motoring group, said: “This is news UK drivers didn’t want to hear ahead of the summer getaway later in the month. The ending of the ceasefire is ominous for UK pump prices but not all is lost. “For starters, a feature of the US-Iran war has been highly volatile oil prices that have fed through to the pump. However, the sharp fall in petrol and diesel prices has by and large tracked the more recent fall in wholesale costs and come through to the pump far more quickly than would have been expected previously,” he said. Market analysts have stopped short of forecasting a return to oil prices of more than $100 a barrel after finding the global market was more resilient to disruption than initially feared. “Nothing can be ruled out,” said Tamas Varga, an analyst at PVM Oil Associates. “But the market’s admirable adaptability in weathering the original crisis, and the $56 decline in the price of Brent during May and June, must be kept in mind when revising oil price forecasts.” The market initially expected a 20m barrel a day loss to global crude supplies as a result of the effective blockade on the strait of Hormuz from March this year. But Gulf producers have been able to use alternative supply routes and clandestine vessel crossings to reduced the net loss to 12.2m barrels a day. Meanwhile, higher production from unaffected producers, the release of emergency crude stocks, and US sanctions waivers covering Russian and Iranian oil in floating storage added a further 9.1m barrels of supply. “The conclusion is that the effective loss from the original 20m barrels a day was only 3.1m,” Varga added.

Photo of bound Palestinian detainee corroborates Israeli torture reports, say rights groups

An Israeli soldier’s photo of a Palestinian man from Gaza stripped to his underwear, blindfolded and bound face-down to an iron rod corroborates extensive reporting on Israeli torture of Palestinians in detention and itself may constitute a war crime, rights groups have said. The image was shared on a now-deleted personal social media account, with the Hebrew-language caption “good morning”. It was brought to wider public attention by a Palestinian writer and activist who goes by Tamer. “Both abusive treatment of detainees and the public sharing of humiliating or degrading images of them can constitute war crimes,” said Oneg Ben Dror from the prisoner and detainees department at Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI). The photo “confirms what thousands of testimonies from Palestinian detainees have exposed, and what we and other organisations have been reporting for nearly three years now,” she added. “Israeli detention facilities are torture camps for Palestinians.” Israel’s military confirmed the authenticity of the photo. “The incident does not align with IDF values and regulations,” a spokesperson said, adding that an inquiry was under way. Holding and photographing the man semi-naked also broke international law, said Sari Bashi, the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. “There is no security justification for holding a detainee in his underwear,” she said. “Forced nudity followed by capturing and sharing sexualised images on social media is a form of sexual violence and also a war crime.” After the photo was widely shared on social media at least two mothers claimed the bound man as their son, highlighting the painful limbo of Palestinian families searching for loved ones missing since their detention by Israeli forces, Bashi added. “This is not the first time Israeli soldiers have published humiliating photos of Palestinian detainees while depriving families of information or access to them. It has become a grotesque and unlawful way for families to get information about their loved ones.” Rana Abu Nasser is sure the photo shows her son Osama, who was seized with his one-year-old son in March, near the shifting “yellow line” that marks the boundary of Israeli military control in Gaza. “I know the details of his body,” she told Reuters. “He has swelling in his foot and scars on his leg – the same swelling on his left leg I saw in the picture.” Joudeh al-Ghoul wept the first time she saw the photo, instantly sure it was her son Amin, missing since his arrest in November 2023, when he was trying to travel from southern Gaza to the north. “It’s him, his hair and chin. He is my son. A mother’s heart can recognise her son. I hugged the mobile phone and started crying,” she said. “He is my son, my soul, my life.” The Israeli military declined to comment on whether the detainee had been identified or given medical support, and whether his family in Gaza had been notified. For seven months at the start of the war the Israeli military refused to provide basic information about the status of people detained in Gaza, in effect implementing a policy of forced disappearance. From May 2024 Israel provided an email address for enquires about Palestinians from Gaza, but that provided only a partial, limited improvement. Israeli authorities had denied holding hundreds of missing Palestinians whose arrest was confirmed by witness testimony, the rights group HaMoked said this year.

UK judges begin hearing appeal over Trinidad and Tobago anti-gay law

Some of the UK’s top judges are hearing arguments over whether a Trinidad and Tobago court had the legal right to overturn a 2018 ruling to remove colonial-era homophobic laws that criminalise anal sex between consenting men. The country’s “buggery law”, often referred to as its “sodomy” law, was created in 1925 and was written into Trinidad and Tobago’s 1986 Sexual Offences Act. In 2017 a Trinidadian LGBTQ+ rights activist, Jason Jones, challenged the law, and in 2018 a high court ruled that it infringed upon his constitutional right to privacy and equality. Last year a court of appeal quashed that decision after an intervention by the country’s attorney general. Now Jones’s appeal is being heard by the London-based judicial committee of the privy council (JCPC), the highest court of appeal for the UK’s overseas territories, crown dependencies and several independent Commonwealth countries. It shares the same judges as the UK supreme court. Activists across the Caribbean are closely watching the proceedings, in which an outcome is expected in three to six months’ time. The Bahamas decriminalised homosexuality in 1991 and the UK government repealed such laws in 2001 in Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Recently, judges have struck down similar laws in Barbados, Dominica, St Lucia and Antigua and Barbuda. However, anal sex remains a crime in Guyana, Grenada, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and St Vincent and the Grenadines. The Trinidadian government is opposing Jones in the case. On Tuesday the prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, argued that the case could have a wide-ranging impact as it could affect other “savings clauses” – laws imposed on Caribbean nations when they were still British colonies to ensure they preserved British laws after independence. “This ruling is going to be a very profound decision, not just impacting on sodomy laws but that whole issue of the saving clause. We have a lot of colonial laws that were saved, so this will give us guidance as to which ones we keep, which ones we don’t keep,” Persad-Bissessar told the Guardian in an interview at a Caribbean leaders’ summit in St Lucia. Darrell Allahar, a minister in the office of the prime minister and one of Persad-Bissessar’s lawyers, described the privy council hearing as a “very good exercise”. “We want to get the court’s view because the issue is more than the sodomy laws, the issue has to do with what is called the savings clause, which is a feature of all of our constitutions in the English-speaking Caribbean,” he said. He added that the clauses were created “to save existing laws at independence so we don’t have a wholesale gutting of those laws in light of the human rights provisions”. Jones, 61, said the case should never have had to reach the British court. “At any time over the last decade of my legal challenge, the state and indeed parliament could have put a stop to this and just removed these heinous laws themselves,” he said. “They have wasted millions of taxpayers’ money fighting me.” He said the law, under which a person can be jailed for up to five years for consensual same-sex intimacy, “dehumanises LGBTQ+ people. It makes us both a criminal and a victim at the same time.” Jones said he was confident he had a strong case. “The privy council will never uphold a 500-year-old homophobic piece of British law that goes against the rights of the individual. Not in 2026,” he said. “I know I’m on the right side of history.” Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s former taoiseach and a global LGBTQI and human rights fellow at Harvard University, said in an interview that the only five countries in the Americas that continued to outlaw homosexuality were formerly under British rule. He pointed to the irony that “colonial-era laws that have long since been repealed in the United Kingdom itself” remained active in former colonies. In a paper for Harvard last week, Varadkar wrote: “From Canada in the north to Chile in the south, homosexuality has been long since been decriminalised in the 35 countries that make up the Americas” apart from Jamaica, Guyana, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and Grenada. “All are anglophone and formerly part of the British empire. This is not a coincidence.” He noted that the UK judges would preside over this week’s hearing in the knowledge that “human rights and freedoms, including the right to privacy and control over what happens to one’s own body and in one’s own bedroom”, were enshrined in British law.