Middle East ceasefire threatens to unravel as Israel assaults Lebanon and Iran blocks oil tankers
Inclusion
of Lebanon is significant difference in interpretation of truce agreed at 11th
hour on Tuesday
Julian
Borger, Andrew Roth and David Smith
Wed 8 Apr
2026 23.10 BST
The fate
of the two-week ceasefire in the Iran conflict looked in peril on Wednesday as
both sides gave divergent versions of what had been agreed, Israel intensified
its bombing campaign in Lebanon and Iran halted the passage of oil tankers
because of an alleged Israeli ceasefire breach.
Iran and
Pakistan, which brokered the 11th-hour truce, both asserted that the ceasefire
included Lebanon.
Israel’s
prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, disagreed and Israeli forces unleashed
their heaviest attack of the war so far on more than 100 targets, killing at
least 254 people. Donald Trump, after initially remaining silent, said Lebanon
was “a separate skirmish” and not part of the deal.
The scale
of Israel’s attacks on Wednesday were condemned as “horrific” by UN rights
chief Volker Turk.
“Such
carnage, within hours of agreeing to a ceasefire with Iran, defies belief. It
places enormous pressure on a fragile peace, which is so desperately needed by
civilians,” he said.
In a
sharply worded statement, Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf
said Israel and the US had violated several clauses of the provisional
ceasefire, and decried Israel’s aggressive bombing of Lebanon and a US demand
that Iran should have no right to enrich its own uranium.
“In such
[a] situation, a bilateral ceasefire or negotiations is unreasonable,” the
statement read.
While the
statement did not announce Iran’s rejection of the ceasefire, it nonetheless
indicated that tensions were strained less than 24 hours after Trump had
announced that a ceasefire agreement had been reached.
Iran’s
Fars news agency said oil tankers passing through the strait of Hormuz had been
stopped as a result of Israel’s “ceasefire breach”.
Iran was
due to have reopened the strait during the two weeks of the ceasefire, and the
oil price had dropped sharply below $100 a barrel in the hours after the truce
was announced, prompting a global stock market surge.
The news
did not bring any immediate relief for the hundreds of laden tankers trapped in
the Gulf by the conflict, which were awaiting approval from insurers before
beginning to move and reported continued interference with their satellite
navigation systems.
The White
House called the reports from Iran’s state media about the closure of the
strait of Hormuz “false” and said Trump expected it to reopen “immediately,
quickly and safely”, as the US signalled continued hope in the ceasefire even
as it threatened to unravel.
Vice-president
JD Vance said he believed the differing views on whether the ceasefire included
Lebanon came from a “legitimate misunderstanding”.
“I think
the Iranians thought that the ceasefire included Lebanon and it just didn’t,”
he said. “We never made that promise.”
Israel
had offered to “check themselves a little bit in Lebanon” to aid the US
negotiations, he added, but would not include it in the ceasefire.
In
Israel, opposition politicians led by Yair Lapid have criticised Netanyahu for
failing to deliver the conclusive victory he had promised in the war and for
delivering instead a “diplomatic disaster” that had eroded the trust between
Israel and the United States.
“We still
have objectives to complete – and we will achieve them either by agreement or
by resuming the fighting,” Netanyahu said in a statement on Wednesday evening.
Marine
traffic has continued at a trickle through the Hormuz strait but at a far lower
rate than before the war. Five vessels were confirmed as having crossed the
strait on Wednesday, four of which were Iranian and heading into the Gulf from
the east, while the fifth was Greek-owned.
AXSMarine,
a French-founded global marine software and tracking company, said it was
“unlikely to see a sudden flurry of vessels rushing for the strait given Iran’s
conditions that passage had to be approved by its armed forces. “It is not the
same as an open strait,” it said.
The
United Arab Emirates claimed its air defences had intercepted 17 ballistic
missiles and 35 drones, apparently fired by Iran over the course of the day
after the ceasefire announcement. Iran was also reported to have attacked a
Saudi oil pipeline to the Red Sea hours after the truce was announced.
Iran’s
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed on Wednesday to have struck
several targets across the region with missiles and drones, including what the
IRGC said were oil facilities of US companies in Yanbu, the Saudi Red Sea port
and pipeline terminal.
Trump
conveyed a different version of the agreement in early Wednesday morning social
media posts from the one he had suggested as he announced the ceasefire on
Tuesday night.
In the
first version, he referred to Iran’s 10-point proposal as a “workable basis on
which to negotiate”, and focused on an agreement to reopen the strait of
Hormuz.
The
statement caused surprise in Washington as Iran’s 10 points differ widely from
US objectives and include a right to enrich uranium, the full lifting of
sanctions, the payment of war reparations and a scheme giving Iran and Oman
joint control of the strait.
Karoline
Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, said during a press conference on Wednesday:
“The Iranians originally put forward a 10-point plan that was fundamentally
unserious, unacceptable and completely discarded. The idea that President Trump
would ever accept an Iranian wishlist as a deal is completely absurd.”
On
Wednesday morning, Trump implied that the ceasefire was based on an entirely
different 15-point proposal from the US, claiming many of the points had
“already been agreed to”.
He
insisted there would be no enrichment of uranium and that the US and Iran would
work together to unearth the Iranian stockpile of 440kg of highly enriched
uranium (HEU), which Trump called “nuclear dust”, enough fissile material for a
dozen nuclear warheads.
Leavitt
said a US negotiating team led by Vance, as well as Trump’s envoys Steve
Witkoff and Jared Kushner would travel to Islamabad in Pakistan for talks set
to begin this weekend. The negotiations with an Iranian delegation – expected
to include its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi – will begin on Saturday.
Iran has
published two different versions of its interpretation of the agreement. The
Farsi version included an acceptance of Iran’s right to enrich uranium. The
English version did not.
Araghchi
confirmed Trump’s claim that the strait of Hormuz would be reopened during the
two weeks of the ceasefire but said shipping would have to apply for safe
passage through coordination with Iran’s armed forces.
Iran’s
military closed the strait – a freely navigable waterway before the war – in
retaliation to the US-Israeli attack on Iran on 28 February and is now charging
tankers a $2m-a-ship toll to pass through.
Tehran’s
apparent interpretation of the ceasefire is that it will allow all shipping to
pass but keep the toll in place, eventually sharing the income with Oman as a
co-custodian of the strait.
Pakistan
is expecting to host talks on Friday to start to cement the ceasefire into a
more durable peace agreement, but on Wednesday the White House had yet to
confirm attendance. The gaps to be bridged appeared as broad as ever, and
certainly wider than at the last talks before the war, on 26 February in
Geneva, where Omani mediators and British observers reported significant
progress.
At the
Pentagon, the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, suggested that if there was
no agreement on Iran’s HEU stockpile, US forces would “take it out”.
Any
operation to extract or destroy the uranium, thought to be stored in scuba
tank-sized canisters and buried down deep shafts under mountains, would be
long, complicated and risky. Trump opted not to pursue such a mission in the
course of the five weeks of conflict, ultimately claiming he did not care about
the HEU as it could be monitored remotely by satellite.
The chair
of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Dan Caine, said US forces remained poised for
a return to combat. “A ceasefire is a pause, and the joint force remains ready
if ordered or called upon,” Caine told reporters.
He said
the US air campaign in Iran had achieved its military objectives, striking more
than 13,000 targets, destroying roughly 90% of Iran’s navy and 95% of its naval
mines.
Hegseth
claimed the US and Israel had “finished completely destroying Iran’s industrial
base” with a final wave of 800 airstrikes overnight on Tuesday. He listed the
Iranian leaders killed in the war, including the supreme leader Ali Khamenei,
and claimed that his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei was “wounded and
disfigured”. The defence secretary claimed, without evidence, that Iran had
“begged for this ceasefire”.
The
Tehran government portrayed the truce in similarly triumphalist terms to its
population. “America was forced to accept a ceasefire,” said Ali Akbar
Velayati, a senior politician and foreign policy adviser to the supreme leader,
according to official media. “In the new geometry of power in the world, Iran
will play a role as the axis of the Islamic pole.”
Trump has
been angered by the refusal of several western allies to support his war
against Iran. Leavitt told reporters that the president planned to discuss the
possibility of the US leaving Nato when he met with the alliance’s secretary
general, Mark Rutte, on Wednesday.
Asked
whether the president would raise the prospect of withdrawing from Nato,
Leavitt replied: “It’s something the president has discussed and I think it’s
something the president will be discussing in a couple of hours with secretary
general Rutte.”
After the meeting, Rutte told CNN that he believes some Nato countries were tested and failed through the course of the war, but that the “large majority of European nations has been helpful with basing, with logistics, with overflight.
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