Sunday deadline for MoU looms as US and Iran continue standoff over Hormuz

The United Arab Emirates on Friday condemned an Iranian attack it said targeted two vessels linked to state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) as they passed through the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has imposed an effective blockade of the strait and wants to charge users for passage, which the US fiercely opposes. Iran is in talks with Oman over arrangements for the strait's future management.

The UAE foreign ministry in a statement denounced what it called "the hostile Iranian attack that targeted two vessels affiliated with ADNOC as they transited the Strait of Hormuz, with no injuries reported".

ADNOC confirmed "two of its vessels were attacked while transiting" the waterway on Thursday evening, adding the situation was "brought under control", the official WAM news agency reported.

 U.S. President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is planning to visit Israel next week for talks on the situation in Gaza, Axios reported on Thursday, citing five sources with knowledge of the plan.

Kushner is also expected to meet with mediators from Egypt, Qatar and Turkey next week in Cairo, Axios reported, citing a source familiar with the matter.

Saudi Arabia's defence minister called Iraq a "cherished neighbour" in talks with a senior Iraqi army official on Thursday, despite last month's deadly US-Saudi strikes on targets in the country.

The Riyadh visit was the first announced by an Iraqi security official to Saudi Arabia since Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi's trip to the kingdom was cancelled after the strikes on 29 July.

Officials from the Hashed al-Shaabi, an armed Iraqi alliance also known as the Popular Mobilisation Forces and that includes pro-Iran groups, said the US-Saudi strikes killed 20 militants, including five Iranians.

Riyadh said its forces had intercepted drones targeting oil facilities, blaming Iran-backed groups in Iraq for the attacks.

"Iraq will remain a cherished neighbour; we share bonds of brotherhood, solidarity, and mutual support with its government and its brotherly people. The Kingdom will always stand by Iraq to support its security, stability, development, and prosperity, for the benefit of Iraq and its brotherly people," Khalid bin Salman wrote in a post on X.

Yemen's Houthis said they attacked an Aramco refinery in Saudi Arabia's Jazan with two drones on Thursday, the Iran-aligned movement's Saba news agency reported.

A Houthi military source said the attack was in response to what the group described as Saudi violations of Yemeni airspace and sovereignty in Saada and Hajjah provinces.

There was no immediate comment on the report from Saudi Arabia.

Iran warned on Thursday of environmental degradation in the Strait of Hormuz after an oil spill reached its southern Qeshm island, calling for compensation from those responsible.

Foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said the slick had "degraded the waters" of the Gulf and Sea of Oman, claiming "preliminary evidence indicates a foreign bulk carrier as the source".

TankerTrackers, a US-hosted website that monitors shipping movements worldwide, said however, that the spill seemed to derive from an Iranian attack on bulk carrier Minoan Pioneer in Omani waters on August 3.

"The spillage then drifted across the strait over to Iran," it said.

Baqaei wrote on X that such spills have in "recent decades imposed trillions of dollars in damage on Iran's coastal areas", calling for compensation.

"Every party that benefits from commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz carries both a legal and a moral obligation to remediate the environmental harm inflicted," he added.

The spill had reached Qeshm island but had been "almost completely cleaned up by Wednesday evening", said Habib Masihi, head of the environmental protection department in Iran's southern province of Hormozgan.

He said about 32,000 square metres of coastal area had been affected along with waters covering 90,000 square metres.

An Israeli airstrike killed two Palestinians, including a senior police official, in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, in the first reported fatalities in more than a week as the Israeli military scaled back its targeted attacks in the enclave under US pressure.

Palestinian medics said the first strike targeted two people riding on a motorbike, in a western area of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. The other person was wounded, they added.

The Israeli military said in a statement that the Khan Younis airstrike targeted a Hamas commander planning an attack on its troops.

Later on Thursday, an Israeli drone launched three missiles against a vehicle driving in western Gaza City, killing the head of the Gaza City police force, and critically wounding two other people medics and witnesses said.

Iran's military on Thursday rejected as "lies" remarks by US President Donald Trump claiming control of the Strait of Hormuz, saying the strategic waterway was fully under Iranian control.

"The false claims of the United States that ships are passing through the Strait of Hormuz normally ... are nothing more than lies and fabrications," said Ebrahim Zolfaghari, the spokesperson for Iran's central military command, Khatam-al Anbiya.

"The Strait of Hormuz is, as in the past, under the complete management and control of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and no commercial ship or tanker without the permission and supervision of the powerful Iranian armed forces has had and will have the possibility of safe passage through this strait," he said in a video carried by state television.

Iran has kept control of Hormuz, a vital energy conduit, since the outbreak of the war in the Middle East on 28 February, requiring vessels to obtain permission and pay transit fees before using the waterway.

An Israeli airstrike killed a Palestinian man in the Gaza Strip on Thursday.

Palestinian medics said the strike targeted two people riding on a motorbike, in a western area of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

The other person was wounded, they added.

The Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, Nabil Fahmy, discussed with the Secretary-General of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jassim Mohammed Al-Budaiwi, the latest developments in the region.

The meeting, which was held in Cairo, tackled several Arab and regional issues of common concern, especially those related to the security and stability of the Arab Gulf states and its implications for Arab national security.

Moreover, discussions will prioritise Arab issues and ways to enhance coordination and integration between the League and the Cooperation Council in dealing with them.

Iran's state media has mocked US President Donald Trump after new details emerged about his secret aircraft switch during a visit to Turkey, saying it showed just how nervous he is about the Islamic Republic's power.

"Again, Trump, with his new scandal, has become the top subject in the U.S. media these days. A scandal stemming from fear of Iran’s military power, a power that caused Trump, last month, while returning from Turkey, to secretly switch his plane," said a presenter on state television, adding that the episode has become a source of "humiliation" for Trump.

A threat that Air Force One could be targeted by a shoulder-fired missile prompted the Secret Service to secretly move Trump onto a smaller government jet, a person briefed on the matter said. The threat emerged on the final day of Trump's visit to Ankara for the NATO summit, the source said, as tensions run high due to the ongoing US war on Iran. The Secret Service deemed the threat to be credible and imminent, prompting an extraordinary operation to conceal the U.S. president's movements.

The New York Times reported that US officials were alarmed to discover that Iranians knew where Trump was staying in Ankara, including the exact floor of his hotel.

US intelligence officials questioned Israeli information that spoke of an Iranian threat to assassinate US President Donald Trump, prompted the implementation of an exceptional security maneuver during which Trump secretly left Turkey on board an alternative military plane, Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing current and former US officials familiar with the intelligence assessments.

One of the officials said that the Israeli government had transferred information about the threat to the CIA, but the agency’s analysts did not find the data convincing, and they conveyed their doubts to officials in the Trump administration.

Kuwait has arrested three Islamic State group members accused of plotting attacks on a Shia mosque as well as "vital facilities", a security source told AFP.

The trio belonged to a single IS cell and included minors, the Kuwaiti source said, requesting anonymity. They had intended to target the mosque and unspecified sites deemed vital to the country.

Earlier this week Kuwait's interior ministry said it had arrested two minors who had been in touch with IS and received training on making explosives to target a place of worship.

A day later, the ministry said it had arrested a Kuwaiti member of IS who had built a drone to attack a "vital facility".

Since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, Gulf countries including Kuwait have arrested dozens of people from cells suspected of links to Iran, mostly Shia Muslims, as the region came under Iranian bombardment.

At least one government soldier was killed and another critically wounded in clashes between Houthis and the military in the mountainous province of Taiz, Yemeni military officials told The Associated Press.

The fighting came as part of a spate of recent attacks by the Houthis on government-held areas across the country. Dozens of government troops have been killed in attacks since last week, the Yemeni military said.

Elsewhere, several tribal leaders in the central province of Marib said the Yemeni army artillery targeted overnight Houthi movements.

The Houthis have been hitting government-held areas with drones and missiles, saying they have been targeting military forces and warehouses. They have also been attacking oil facilities in neighboring Saudi Arabia, which supports the Yemeni government, and the kingdom’s shipping in the Red Sea.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rejection of US President Donald Trump's Board of Peace 15-point plan has shifted Palestinian factions' focus to disputes over disarmament, Israeli withdrawal, and political control, linking Gaza's future to these issues.

After nearly three years of the Israeli genocidal war, Hamas and Fatah remain divided and face political and organisational limits. Smaller factions like Islamic Jihad have even less capacity to influence Gaza's future.

The issue isn't just how Palestinians should respond to Israel, but also each faction's role post-war. 

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Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan will form political and military mechanisms under a defence pact signed between the regional powers last week, Turkey's defence ministry said on Thursday, adding the alliance would also deepen defence industry cooperation.

The three countries signed the "Mecca Joint Defence Agreement" on 7 August, wedding states alarmed at a regional conflagration from the US-Israeli war on Iran. They said the accord stipulates that an armed attack against any member would be regarded as an attack on all, similar to NATO's Article 5 collective defence clause.

At a weekly briefing in Ankara, the ministry said the mechanisms would include the three countries' defence ministers, foreign ministers, and military chiefs.

It added that the joint military exercises were also being planned under the pact, while cooperation could include joint production and technology sharing in the defence industry.

Iran will soon join the New Development Bank, the development lender established by the BRICS group of nations, central bank governor Abdolnaser Hemmati said in a state media report published on Wednesday ahead of a BRICS finance meeting in India.

Iran remains under sweeping US sanctions, and it has yet to reach a peace deal to end the war launched by the US and Israel on 28 February, giving Tehran added incentive to seek alternative financial channels outside the dollar system.

The NDB's corporate communications division told Reuters it could not confirm information regarding Iran's membership.

Iran joined BRICS in 2024 as the group expanded, in a move aimed at deepening economic ties among emerging economies, and it has since made clear its desire to become a member and shareholder of the NDB.

A survey by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) found that 38% of Jewish Israelis support annexing the entire occupied West Bank, and 35% favor partitioning it, according to Israeli media.

The poll noted that 22% of Jewish Israelis would like annexation to be followed by a forced relocation of the Palestinian population to other countries.

21 % backed Palestinian statehood in Arab-majority areas, while 14% supported the area being annexed to Jordan.

The poll also found 58% of all Israelis do not believe the recently announced agreement for the disarmament of Hamas in Gaza will be implemented. 13% expect the deal to actually lead to renewed fighting.

The survey was conducted among 748 respondents, Jewish and Arab, on August 2-5, 2026.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the US "has long miscalculated due to intelligence failures," including when launching its war on Iran.

In a post on X, Araghchi said Washington’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz were "an even bigger miscalculation."

"Worse than fake news is fake intelligence," the foreign minister wrote.

It’s March 4 in Baghdad. The operations room at the command headquarters of the Iran-backed Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) is bustling. Faces are tired and tense, eyes darting between screens connected to thermal cameras deployed across operational sectors and tablets displaying military maps. It is 9:00pm, and all indications suggest that the night would be as long as the ones before it.

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More than 30 nations, including France, Britain and Canada, have condemned Iran's use of capital punishment, saying in a joint statement on Wednesday the Islamic republic was executing protesters to "silence dissent".

The countries, joined by the European Union's top diplomat, "condemn in the strongest terms the ongoing executions of protesters and use of the death penalty" by Iran.

"The use of capital punishment to silence dissent, intimidate communities, and punish individuals exercising their human rights can never be justified," the statement said.

"The people of Iran must be free to exercise their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly without fear."

After the initial 26 countries and the EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, "other countries joined this declaration", bringing the number of signatories to 32, the French foreign ministry told AFP.

Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Italy, Germany and numerous other European nations were among those calling for Iran "to immediately end the use of the death penalty and release all those arbitrarily detained".

According to the semi-official Fars news agency, the head of Iran's paramilitary Basij Hossein Taeb boasts that the Strait of Hormuz is "under Iran's control and management."

Britain's economic growth slowed in the second quarter compared with the first three months of the year, official data showed Thursday, as the country faced political unrest at home and fallout from the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Gross domestic product increased 0.4 percent in the April-June period after an expansion of 0.6 percent in the first quarter, the Office for National Statistics said in a statement.

Keir Starmer resigned as prime minister in late June and was replaced around one month later by Andy Burnham, as the Labour government was overtaken in opinion polls by the hard-right party Reform UK.

Following Thursday's data, the country's new finance minister, John Healey, said that under Burnham, Labour was a "hands-on government, putting British interests first—giving breathing space to those feeling the strain, making our country more resilient and bringing hope back".

After a death sentence was passed in absentia against ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad this week, questions have arisen over the ruling's potential impact on the transitional justice process and efforts to his extradite the former dictator from Russia.

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Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam on Wednesday condemned Israel's "systematic destruction" in the country's south as a violation of international law, as Israel's defence minister said its military was "destroying all the houses" there.

Salam said Israeli "attacks, incursions, demolitions and the systematic destruction of homes", infrastructure, government buildings and places of worship "represent a serious violation of the principles and rules of international law and international humanitarian law".

Claiming that villages and towns "are entirely 'military facilities' does not stand up to any logic and cannot be used as an excuse for destroying them, displacing their inhabitants and preventing them from returning," he said in a statement.

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"We are low-keying it," US president Donald Trump told news site Axios by phone Sunday.

"We're only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money."

The billionaire has since repeated that he is keeping the option of striking Tehran on the table, but prefers to stress the economic damage inflicted on the country through economic sanctions.

"Iran is broke, totally broke and they're not paying their soldiers," Trump said Monday in the Oval Office.

He has repeatedly claimed, most recently in a Truth Social post on Wednesday, that the country is experiencing inflation of over 300 percent.

He also claimed there is no urgency to act because the United States has "total control" of the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway for the oil trade that has become the geopolitical flashpoint of the conflict.