All eyes on Lebanon as US-Iran deal hangs in the balance

The live blog has now ended and will be back tomorrow at 9am BST. You can read more of The New Arab's coverage of the ongoing war in the region here.

Israeli weapons exports reached a record high of more than $19 billion last year, a 30% increase from 2024, Israel's Defence Ministry claimed on Tuesday.

More than half of 2025's sales were "mega-deals" valued at $100 million or more, the ministry said, adding that sales have more than doubled in the last five years, despite widespread criticism of Israel's genocidal war in Gaza, its invasion and occupation of Lebanon, and its attack on Iran.

It did not identify any of the buyers.

Countries that have vowed to shun Israeli weapons makers are nonetheless quietly placing orders, according to industry officials. Experts say governments look to Israel because its weapons are 'battle-tested', as in used against various communities and civilians, and they're able to see in real time that the munitions and systems 'work'.

Europe was the largest purchaser, accounting for 36% of total exports in 2025, which is around $6.9 billion. This is down from around $7.9 billion worth of exports to Europe last year.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday that Iran's supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who was wounded in US-Israeli attacks and has not been seen in public since assuming office, is alive and increasingly active.

"I think there are indications out there that he is increasingly engaging at some level," Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, succeeded his father Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the first wave of US-Israeli strikes that launched the war on 28 February.

Hezbollah will not accept a "partial ceasefire" with Israel, a senior official from the group said Tuesday, refusing to halt attacks against northern Israel in exchange for Israel sparing Beirut's southern suburbs.

"We will not accept a partial ceasefire," Mahmud Qomati told AFP in a written statement, adding that "the Zionist enemy should know that any aggression against the suburbs could lead to a deeper and stronger response" from the group.

Even if the Middle East war stopped immediately, disrupted global humanitarian supply lines would not recover before 2027, the United Nations said Tuesday.

Nearly 100 days on from the 28 February US-Israeli attacks on Iran which triggered the conflict, the fall-out extends far beyond the Middle East region, said Jean-Cedric Meeus, chief of global transport and logistics for the UN children's agency UNICEF.

"The disruption to the global humanitarian supply chain is impacting children across all the globe, with continued congestion in global supply chain routes and higher costs," he told a press conference in Geneva.

"What begins like a disruption from lanes into the Middle East, the Hormuz Strait, spirals directly into humanitarian crisis," said Meeus, speaking from Mogadishu in Somalia.

"For UNICEF, persistent delays and high operational costs, when they come into the context of global funding crisis, are already causing impossible choices.

"Behind this cascading disruption is a simple but brutal equation," he said, with every extra dollar spent on transport meaning less money spent on aid for children.

Iran said on Tuesday it will hold a three-day state funeral for late supreme leader Ali Khamenei, killed by US-Israeli strikes on the first day of the Middle East war, at a date to be announced.

Ali Khamenei, who led the Islamic republic for nearly 37 years, was killed in his home in central Tehran on 28 February. A state funeral initially planned for 4 March 4 was postponed due to the war.

"A three-day public funeral is planned," Tehran Deputy Mayor Mohammad Amin Tavakolizadeh was quoted as saying by state television on Tuesday.

Tavakolizadeh did not specify when the funeral would take place but said it could be in early Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, which falls in mid-June.

He said funeral events would take place in Tehran, as well as in the holy cities of Qom and Mashhad, where Khamenei would be buried.

"In Tehran, the ceremony will last at least 24 hours," Tavakolizadeh stated, adding that up to 20 million people are expected to attend.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers on Tuesday that Iran had agreed to negotiate aspects of its nuclear program that it previously refused to discuss, but he said that was not a guarantee that talks will lead to a deal to end the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday said Israel would help to make Iran's "terror regime" disappear, as talks to reach a peace agreement between the US and the Islamic republic appeared to stutter.

"This terror regime which is destined to disappear from the world, and we will help bring about this outcome, this regime will no longer threaten us with nuclear bombs and thousands of lethal ballistic missiles," Netanyahu said at an event marking the appointment of Major General Roman Gofman as the head of Israel's Mossad spy agency.

War does not erase social classes but sharpens their differences: the wealthiest can flee and rent new homes, the poorest sleep in shelters or inside their cars.

Migrants, however poor and racialised, have no place to welcome them. This is the reality for hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in Lebanon: caught between Israeli bombs and a land that has never recognised them.

According to the latest data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), approximately 164,097 migrants were identified in Lebanon as part of periodic monitoring, updated to January 2026.

The same organisation estimates that by March 2026, over 45,000 migrants will have been forced to flee their homes or workplaces due to hostilities.

But the numbers recorded by the IOM are extremely reductive when considering the hundreds of migrant workers who are not registered.

You can read more about the migrant workers trapped between war and Kafala below:

An exchange of messages between Iran and the United States to reach a memorandum of understanding on a deal to end the war "stopped a few days ago", Iran's semi-official Fars news agency reported, citing a source with knowledge of the matter.

The latest message from Tehran to Washington was "a clear message about Lebanon, the agency added.

As US-Iran diplomacy hangs in the balance, Lebanon risks becoming collateral damage in a bargain shaped by outside powers, writes Alex Martin Astley.

Read more below: 

The fourth round of talks between Israel and Lebanon has begun at the US State Department. 

Lebanon's current government is banking on negotiations as a viable means to end Israel's invasion and occupation of the southern parts of the country. 

So far, since 2 March alone, Israel has killed over 3,300 people.   

Lebanon's health ministry said Tuesday that Israeli strikes a day earlier near a hospital in the southern city of Tyre killed four people and wounded 127 others, including 39 staff from the facility.

The ministry statement said the wounded staff at the Jabal Amel hospital were "four doctors, 27 nurses, and eight (administrative) employees -- four of whom are in critical condition and receiving treatment in intensive care".

The attack "also caused severe and extensive damage across the hospital's various floors, departments, and parking lot"," it added.

Iran's football team will leave for Spain this weekend en route to their World Cup base in Mexico despite still awaiting visas, the head of the country's football federation said.

The 2026 World Cup is being hosted jointly by the United States, Mexico and Canada.

Neither the United States, where Iran will play their three group-stage matches, nor Mexico, where the team will be based throughout the tournament, has yet to issue visas for the players.

"We will leave for Spain on Saturday, and from there the team will go directly to Tijuana in Mexico," football federation chief Mehdi Taj said on Monday on a sports programme broadcast on state television.

"We will obtain a Mexican visa tomorrow (Tuesday) or the day after, and then a US visa will be issued quickly," Taj said.

Iran has been drawn in Group G and will play New Zealand and Belgium in Los Angeles on June 15 and 21, followed by a game against Egypt in Seattle on June 26.

Taj said that the outbreak of the Middle East war on February 28, when the United States and Israel attacked Iran, "changed everything" for Team Melli.

"The situation in the country, and especially the war, has upended all our plans," Taj said.

"We had arranged good warm-up matches, including one against Spain, which was cancelled" in February.

The Iranians relocated their World Cup base, which was initially planned for Tucson in the US state of Arizona, to the northwestern Mexican border city of Tijuana due to tensions over the US-Israeli war on Iran, and Israel's genocides of Gaza and Lebanon.

Iran is currently preparing for the tournament in Turkey.

On Friday, they beat Gambia 3-1 in a friendly in Antalya, where they will play another warm-up match against Mali on Thursday.

Taj complained that the team's World Cup preparations had also been dogged by "financial difficulties" due to the country's economic crisis and the sharp depreciation of the rial against the dollar.

According to the US-based, oligarch-owned The Washington Post, on Monday, the last-minute amendments to the terms of the agreement by UA negotiators over the weekend, in addition to Israeli operations in Lebanon, contributed to obstructing progress in the talks with Iran.

The newspaper quoted an informed official as claiming that the US negotiators did not inform their Iranian counterparts of the new terms of the agreement, prompting Tehran to withdraw from the talks. For its part, Iran claims it withdrew from the talks over Israel's attacks on Lebanon and Gaza.

The newspaper reported that US Army planners on several continents have raised the alert level in anticipation of a possible expansion of the scope of hostilities, according to informed sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The sources confirmed that these preparations do not necessarily mean imminent military strikes, but are precautionary measures in the event of widespread, renewed fighting, noting that US military officials in Europe and Africa have strengthened force protection measures.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Navy announced on Tuesday that 24 commercial ships had crossed the Strait of Hormuz in the last 24 hours after obtaining the necessary traffic permits.

Israel's defence minister claimed on Tuesday that Washington had given its backing to potential Israeli strikes on Beirut's southern suburb, if Iran-backed group Hezbollah attacked northern Israeli settlements.

"The Prime Minister and I led a coordinated move together with the IDF to establish a new equation... If Israeli towns continue to be attacked, we will evacuate and strike the Shia Dahiyeh quarter in Beirut, Hezbollah's stronghold," Israel Katz said at a conference, a defence ministry statement said.

"The United States endorsed this principle and conveyed it to the Lebanese government and all relevant actors... either the fire on Israeli communities stops, or—if fire continues—we will strike in Dahiyeh. This equation will be upheld."

The Bahraini interior ministry announced that Bahraini citizens are banned from travelling to either Iran or Iraq, citing "current security tensions" without elaborating further.

Heavy Israeli airstrikes have been focused on the major city of Nabatieh in southern Lebanon on Tuesday.

Moreover, after an onslaught of strikes, the Israeli military warned residents of the southern Lebanese city to evacuate ahead of more planned strikes in the area.

"In light of the Hezbollah terrorist organisation's violation of the ceasefire agreement, the IDF is compelled to act against it with force," the military's Arabic-language spokesman, Colonel Avichary Adraee, posted on X. "For your safety, you must evacuate your homes immediately and move north of the Zahrani River."

Israeli attacks killed at least three Palestinians in separate incidents across the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, Gaza health officials said.

Medics said at least one person was killed and four were wounded when an Israeli airstrike hit a vehicle east of Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip. The blast left the vehicle a mangled skeleton.

Another strike earlier in the day killed one person and wounded another in the nearby Zawayda town, they added, while Israeli gunfire killed one man in northwest Khan Younis, south of the enclave.

An alleged October 2025 ceasefire, brokered by US President Donald Trump, has failed to halt Israeli killings in Gaza.

Some 930 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes since ⁠the truce came into effect, according to figures from Gaza health officials that do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Armed Palestinian resistance groups have killed four Israeli soldiers during the ⁠same period.

Israel's Civil Administration, which oversees civilian affairs in the occupied West Bank, says it has begun to expropriate 320 dunams (approximately 80 acres) of Palestinian land for the "preservation and development" of the Herodium archaeological site.

"[The expropriation] is being advanced in accordance with the law, following comprehensive professional assessments conducted by the Civil Administration’s Staff Officer for Archaeology and Staff Officer for Nature Reserves," the Civil Administration claimed. "Their findings pointed to an urgent need to regulate the area and promote preservation efforts at the site in order to prevent damage to archaeological remains of unique historical and cultural significance."

The latest move comes amid a push by coalition lawmakers to pass a bill extending direct Israeli civilian control over antiquities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, which is widely viewed as a step toward Israeli annexation. 

The Knesset Education, Culture and Sports Committee had scheduled a vote to advance the bill to the plenum for its final readings today, but the meeting was cancelled after yesterday’s meeting to discuss amendments to the bill’s language was cut short, as the coalition did not have enough MKs attending the meeting to secure a majority.

A senior Iranian military officer says that a resumption of hostilities with the United States is inevitable, as negotiations between Tehran and Washington appear to stall.

"The United States demands our total surrender, and the Iranian nation will never surrender," says Mohammad Jafar Assadi, deputy head of Iran's central military command, Khatam al-Anbiya. "Without surrender, war is inevitable."

Speaking to the press, Lebanon's Finance Minister Yassine Jaber has said losses caused by the war have exceeded $20 billion and could climb towards $25 billion if  Israel continues its invasion and occupation of the country.

The minister warned that the total economic and social damage will not become clear until the fighting ends and displaced communities begin returning to their homes.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese army says two soldiers were moderately wounded in an Israeli drone strike on a road between the towns of Habboush and Deir al-Zahrani, in the Nabatieh area.

Israeli drones are back over the Lebanese capital, buzzing loudly at the moment.

Equities mostly rose on Tuesday as investors assessed the chances of an agreement to end the US-Israeli war on Iran, though Donald Trump and Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu's mixed signals over ending Israel's attacks in Lebanon caused uncertainty.

While Wall Street ended with more tech-led records, Asia's recent rally stuttered, while attention also turned to the release of US jobs data at the end of the week.

The US president said he had held talks with the Israeli prime minister and a "very good call" through unnamed representatives with the Hezbollah militant group.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that Netanyahu agreed to call off a military raid on Beirut, while the Lebanon-based group said "all shooting will stop".

Lebanon's US embassy said Hezbollah had accepted a US proposal for a "mutual cessation of attacks".

But the Israeli leader appeared to cast doubt on any truce, while a report in the US news outlet Axios said Trump called him "crazy" and accused him of putting Iran peace talks at risk.

In a separate post, the US president said: "talks are continuing, at a rapid pace, with the Islamic Republic of Iran."

But Iran's news agency Tasnim reported Tehran had suspended dialogue with mediators in protest of Israel's expanding offensive in Lebanon against Iran's ally Hezbollah.

In a message carried by state TV, the Revolutionary Guards intelligence body said "crossing the red lines in Lebanon and Gaza" would mean "direct war".

Tasnim reported that Iran would keep a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—through which about a fifth of global oil normally passes—and, with its allies, "activate other fronts", including the Bab al-Mandeb Strait at the entrance to the Red Sea.

Earlier Monday, the US leader had told CNBC that "I don't care" if the Iran peace talks collapsed, adding that "frankly, I thought they started to get very boring".

Iran's comments sent oil prices surging as much as seven per cent on Monday before they pared the gains. Both main contracts fell on Tuesday.

Despite uncertainty hanging over the crisis, Asian equities mostly advanced after a slow start to the day, helped by another surge in tech firms.

Seoul, which has been at the forefront of the rally this year, reversed a morning retreat to end at another all-time high, while Hong Kong jumped more than two per cent thanks to a more than 10 per cent jump in tech giant Tencent. E-commerce titans Alibaba and JD.com also enjoyed huge gains.

Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, Manila, Mumbai, Bangkok and Jakarta also rose, but there were losses in Tokyo, Sydney and Wellington.

London, Paris and Frankfurt climbed at the open.

"Expectations for a US-Iran agreement remain fluid," Jason Pride and Michael Reynolds at Glenmede said. "Recent strikes and conflicting statements from both sides highlight that key details remain unresolved."

The largely positive day came on the back of records for all three main indexes on Wall Street that came as chip colossus Nvidia rocketed more than six percent after unveiling a powerful laptop chip for Windows machines.

According to Palestinian reports, Israeli forces abducted at least 31 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank early this morning, including released prisoners and four female students from Birzeit University north of Ramallah.

According to the reports, 13 people were abducted in Tulkarm during raids on homes in the city and its surroundings.

Moreover, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that Israeli settlers set fire to two vehicles early in the morning and spray-painted racist graffiti in the village of Umm Safa, north of Ramallah. 

Iran has not yet responded to a proposed final agreement with the United States aimed at ending the conflict between the two countries, and discussions on the final text are continuing in Tehran, a source close to the Iranian negotiating team told Mehr News on Tuesday.

The source said Iran was reviewing the proposal cautiously because of what it sees as a history of US non-compliance and longstanding mistrust.

"Based on previous experiences, Iran is seeking tangible and real benefits," the source said. 

The Israeli army continued its attacks across southern Lebanon, notably striking towns and villages near the city of Nabatieh.

Moreover, Israeli drones carried out three strikes on the town of Tallet Tol in the Nabatieh district, and a separate Israeli airstrike hit near Tebbine.

Also, an Israeli drone targeted and killed a Lebanese dentist and his two children in their car as they were travelling in southern Lebanon on the Nabatieh-Khardali road, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA). Their car was reportedly targeted by an Israeli drone on their journey returning home from Sidon.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is set to face questions today, Tuesday, about the Trump administration's stalling diplomatic efforts around the world when he appears for back-to-back hearings on Capitol Hill for the first time since the US-Israeli war on Iran began.

The former Republican senator will sit before House and Senate committees to make the State Department’s annual budget request. But the focus is likely to shift quickly to the already unsteady ceasefire between Washington and Tehran, which has been further tested in recent days by back-and-forth attacks.

Cabinet members, including Rubio, have defended President Donald Trump's decision to launch the conflict despite promises over the years not to engage in "forever wars" overseas. That work has been made more difficult by Trump's shifting goals for the current war with Iran.

Israeli forces raised their flag over the historic Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon on Sunday as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to portray the occupation of the hilltop site as a major victory, but continued Hezbollah attacks and Israeli casualties have cast doubt on the military significance of the move.

But, for retired Lebanese brigadier general and military analyst Bassam Yassin, the occupation of Beaufort was neither unexpected nor decisive.

"It was known from the beginning of the battle that Israel would eventually reach Beaufort," Yassin told The New Arab. "The capture of Beaufort does not change anything in the military equation. Hezbollah will continue launching drones and rockets. Why would that change?"

Read more below:

The US-based outlet Axios reported that US President Donald Trump lashed out at Israel's Netanyahu during “an expletive-laden” phone call on Monday after Israel had announced that its plan to start bombing of Beirut's southern suburbs once again.

According to the report, which cited two US officials and a third source, Trump called Netanyahu "f**king crazy" and added, "Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this."

"One of the officials said this was one of Trump’s worst calls with Netanyahu since he returned to office," Axios added.