Reuters has issued an alert saying Israel and Hezbollah have agreed to a ceasefire starting today at 4pm local time, according to a senior US official.
The news agency reported the following:
“Hezbollah and Israel have agreed to a ceasefire,” the official said on background, adding that negotiators for the US and Qataris worked out the deal with help from Iran.
“We understand that after the exchange of fire earlier today, Israel and Hezbollah are now in a ceasefire.”
We will bring you more as we get it.
The Israeli military killed at least 47 people on Friday, and wounded 97 others, across southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley according to the Lebanese health ministry.
The ministry reports that the deadliest attack was reported in Harouf, where nine people, including three women, were killed and 14 others were wounded.
This would make it the second deadliest day since the tensions between Lebanon and Israel rose in March.
The airstrikes took place from midnight until the afternoon on Friday, and were in response to Iranian backed Hezbollah killing four Israeli soldiers, according to Israel.
The ministry reports that 3,980 people have been killed and 12,001 wounded in Israeli attacks on Lebanon since 2 March.
Human Rights Watch has said that Israel’s “killing of civilians” and “displacement of hundreds of thousands” of people have “continued unabated despite the declaration of a ceasefire.”
A senior EU official has welcomed a plan to draw up options related to the EU’s trade with illegal settlements on the West Bank.
In a draft summit communiqué EU leaders expressed “grave concern over the deteriorating situation in Gaza and the West Bank, including the persistent and devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza”.
Earlier this week the EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas promised “a list of options for possible trade measures, including measures aimed at preventing imports of goods originating from illegal settlements” before the next meeting of EU foreign ministers in mid July.
Speaking after an EU summit, the European Council president welcomed the decision to draw up an options paper – a move critics are likely to say falls well short of what the bloc should be doing.
EU leaders have faced blistering criticism from more than 450 former politicians and senior officials for “failure to show moral and political leadership” over Israel’s conduct towards Palestinians. The group, who signed an editorial calling for the suspension of preferential trade with Israel, includes former prime ministers, Stefan Löfven of Sweden, Leo Varadkar of Ireland and Romano Prodi of Italy, who also led the European Commission.
Ireland’s prime minister, Micheál Martin, said on Friday his country was looking for proposals on the illegal settlements. “I think that Europe has to send a very clear signal that what has been happening and what continues to happen is unacceptable, in Gaza and in the West Bank in particular and in Lebanon.”
More than 1.2m Europeans have called on the bloc to suspend an EU-Israel association agreement, a prospect that is out of reach as it requires unanimity.
Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson from Iran’s foreign ministry, has denied reports that Tehran has invited the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect its nuclear facilities – Al Jazeera reports.
He says that Iran will maintain the current status quo of its nuclear programme pending a final deal with the US.
Concerns are being raised as to when Iran and US will finalise their peace deal, now that their 60-day-period has started to come to an agreement. Talks were supposed to start on Friday in Switzerland, but have been postponed.
Baghaei says inspections of facilities that have been carried out until now, such as at Bushehr, will continue. However inspections of any other facilities, where visits from the IAEA was suspended during the war, will take place once a final deal has been reached.
Barack Obama has said that after 15 weeks of war with Iran, the US is now “worse off” than before the conflict started in February.
“We’ve now fought a war, spent billions and billions of dollars, you know, put enormous strain on our military. A lot of people have died. And it feels like we’re back where we were before we started the war, except maybe a little bit worse off,” the former US president told NBC News in an interview that aired on Friday.
Obama, who spoke to the outlet before the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago today, offered remarks on the memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran signed by Donald Trump in Paris earlier this week.
“I am very happy to see a ceasefire,” Obama said. “And I’m hopeful that it holds.”
Obama has been critical of the rationale for the conflict and questioned the first Trump administration’s decision to tear up the 2015 agreement with Iran that was negotiated by the Obama administration. Known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, that deal restricted Iran from obtaining or developing a nuclear weapon in exchange for lifting international economic sanctions.
Obama said that under the JCPOA, “Iran had agreed not to develop nuclear weapons”, but noted that Trump then “pulled out of it, which caused then Iran to develop more nuclear capacity”.
The former president’s remarks come as the White House said that JD Vance had delayed a planned trip to Switzerland to lead a new round of talks with the Islamic republic focusing on the nuclear issue.
Read the full report here:
The Iranian foreign ministry has said there is “no urgency” to meet US negotiators in Switzerland, as a memorandum of understanding to end the Middle East war had already been signed electronically.
“Given that the signing of the text of the MoU was done digitally on June 18, there is no urgency to hold the said meeting in Switzerland, but we are planning to hold a meeting in the coming days,” the ministry’s spokesman, Esmaeil Baqaei, said.
Israeli airstrikes across southern and eastern Lebanon today have killed at least 21 people, according to the Lebanese health officials.
The IDF also announced four of its soldiers were killed in Lebanon as violence escalated between the Israeli military and Hezbollah overnight.
Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon killed 18 people and wounded 33, the country’s health ministry said, according to the state-run National News Agency. Another three people were killed and six injured in attacks in the eastern Baalbek area, which had been largely spared since the start of the renewed conflict in March.
The IDF said the strikes were in response to “repeated violations of the ceasefire by Hezbollah”.
There has not been official confirmation of a ceasefire in Lebanon from either Israel or Hezbollah, but it reportedly came into effect at 4pm local time (it is now 4.45pm in Beirut).
Effie Defrin, a spokesperson for the Israeli military, said the IDF will remain in southern Lebanon and “carry on with its mission until ordered otherwise” to protect civilians in northern Israel.
Addressing the reported ceasefire during a press briefing, he said: “Our objective and mission are very clear. Anything concerning any agreements is a matter for the government.
“As long as we haven’t received different orders, we’ll act in accordance with the army’s chief of staff’s orders.”
In a post on social media, the IDF said it launched more than 150 strikes in Lebanon since midnight.
Hezbollah has implemented the ceasefire with Israel that was due to take effect from 4pm today, two sources from the Iran-backed group told Reuters.
The news agency reported the sources saying: “As soon as we got word of the ceasefire we applied it from our end.”
Several other media outlets including AP, AFP and the Times of Israel have cited sources confirming the ceasefire in Lebanon, which was reportedly mediated by Qatar, Iran and the US.
Donald Trump has defended his deal to end the war with Iran as more details of the memorandum of understanding have been made public. So what does Iran get out of it, and can the US really claim this as a win? The Guardian’s global affairs correspondent, Andrew Roth, explains:
Donald Trump has again defended his deal with Iran in a series of posts on Truth Social, hitting out at critics who believe the memorandum of understanding signed on Wednesday is more generous to Tehran than Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal.
Trump wrote:
The War has diminished Iran! It doesn’t, any longer, have an Air Force, a Navy, Antiaircraft Equipment, Radar, or practically anything else, and yet the Dumocrats say that Iran is better off now than it was four months ago. Can you imagine getting away with that??? How stupid can some people be???”
He added:
We didn’t meet out of desperation, Iran did. They are FINISHED! We’ll play out the 60 days. They get no money, not ten cents!”
