Trump convenes White House Situation Room meeting

Donald Trump convened a White House Situation Room meeting on Saturday morning to discuss the renewed crisis around the strait of Hormuz and negotiations with Iran, according to reporting from Axios.

A senior US official told Axios that unless there is a breakthrough in peace talks, it appears that the war could reopen within days. There is still no firm date for negotiations to resume this weekend, despite Trump’s hopes to end the conflict before the ceasefire expires on Tuesday.

The official told Axios that JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth and Scott Bessent, among other senior government officials, were present at today’s meeting.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards says they will blockade strait of Hormuz again as of today

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) will blockade the strait of Hormuz again as of today, the IRGC warned in a statement published by semi-official news agency Tasnim News.

“Approaching the strait of Hormuz will be considered cooperation with the enemy, and any offending vessel will be targeted,” the IRGC statement read. The statement cited the US blockade as a ceasefire violation.

Iran is not yet ready to hold a new round of face-to-face talks with US officials, a senior Iranian official said Saturday, citing Washington’s refusal to abandon “maximalist” demands on key issues.

In an interview with the Associated Press on the margins of a diplomacy forum in Turkey, Iranian deputy foreign minister Saeed Khatibzadeh also said his country will not hand over its enriched uranium to the US, rejecting claims made by Donald Trump.

“I can tell you that no enriched material is going to be shipped to the United States,” Khatibzadeh said. “This is a non-starter and I can assure you that while we are ready to address any concerns that we do have, we’re not going to accept things that are non-starters.”

Khatibzadeh said there have been many exchanges of messages between the sides but accused the US of holding firm on demands Iran deems to be excessive.

“We are still not there yet to move on to an actual meeting because there are issues that the Americans have not yet abandoned, their maximalist position,” Khatibzadeh said. Iran was seeking the finalization of a “framework agreement” before moving to an in-person meeting, he added.

Pope Leo says ‘not in my interest at all’ to debate Trump on Iran war

Pope Leo XIV said Saturday that it is “not in my interest at all” to debate Donald Trump about the Iran war, but that he would continue preaching the Gospel message of peace.

Leo spoke to reporters aboard the papal plane flying from Cameroon to Angola as part of his 11-day tour of Africa.

He addressed the spiraling back-and-forth saga of Trump’s critiques of his peace message, which have dominated news headlines this week. But the American pope also sought to set the record straight, insisting that his preaching isn’t directed at Trump, but reflects the broader Gospel message of peace.

“There’s been a certain narrative that has not been accurate in all of its aspects, but because of the political situation created when, on the first day of the trip, the president of the United States made some comments about myself,” he said. “Much of what has been written since then has been more commentary on commentary, trying to interpret what has been said.”

Unicef pauses operations in north Gaza Strip after contractors killed

The Israeli military killed two Unicef-contracted truck drivers at a water point in the northern Gaza strip, forcing the UN agency to suspend its operations in the area, Unicef said.

Two other people were also injured in the attack that occurred at the Mansoura water-filling point in Gaza City, Unicef said in a statement.

Unicef said the point is being used multiple times a day to provide hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza City with clean water from the Mekorot water supply line.

The agency said it suspended onsite activities until security conditions in the area are restored.

India said it had called in the Iranian envoy to New Delhi and flagged its “deep concern” over the attack on two Indian-flagged ships attempting to cross the strait of Hormuz on Saturday.

One of the vessels attacked was identified as the Sanmar Herald, an Indian government source told Reuters. The crew on board and the vessel were safe, the source said.

India’s top foreign ministry official asked the Iranian ambassador to convey India’s view to Iranian authorities and resume at the earliest the process of facilitating India-bound ships across the strait, a statement from the ministry said. The ambassador said he would convey these views to Iranian authorities, the statement said.

The US military is preparing in the coming days to board Iran-linked oil tankers and seize commercial ships in international waters, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing US officials.

The Iranian military has continued to tighten its grip on the strait of Hormuz, attacking several commercial vessels on Saturday as it declared the waterway was being “strictly controlled” by Iran. Shipping companies are left scrambling a day after Iran’s foreign minister said the strait was fully open to commercial traffic, an announcement that was welcomed by Trump.

Two Indian-flagged vessels carrying crude oil were attacked on Saturday while attempting to cross the strait of Hormuz, India’s ministry of external affairs said in a statement.

Tehran’s ambassador to New Delhi, Mohammad Fathali, was called in for a meeting with India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, during which Misri conveyed India’s deep concern at the shooting incident involving two Indian-flagged ships. Misri urged the ambassador to convey India’s views to the authorities in Iran and resume at the earliest the process of facilitating India-bound ships across the strait.

On the night of 27 February, the day before the US and Israel would carry out strikes on Iran, an unusual influx of about 150 accounts on the online betting market Polymarket placed bets that the US would strike Iran the next day. Analysis found the bets totalled $855,000, with 16 accounts pocketing more than $100,000 each.

Guardian reporter Lauren Aratani looked at the suspiciously well-timed financial bets on the Iran war and the serious ethical and legal concerns they raise.

Aratani explores how prediction markets may be enabling people to profit from inside knowledge of geopolitical events, potentially even before they happen.

Hezbollah denies involvement in deadly attack on UN peacekeepers in Lebanon

Hezbollah has denied it was involved in the deadly attack against UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, which killed a French soldier.

A UN peacekeeper was killed and three others were injured after a patrol came under attack from “non-state actors”, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) said.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, identified the slain peacekeeper as Florian Montorio, a French national, and suggested in a statement that Hezbollah was responsible.

The Hezbollah-owned al-Manar TV reported: “Hezbollah denied any involvement in the incident with Unifil forces in the south and called for caution in assigning blame and judgment.”

Al-Manar reported a further statement from the Iran-backed group, in which it said it was “surprised by the positions that have been quick to level baseless accusations, while these parties remain silent and make no sound when the Israeli enemy attacks Unifil forces”.

Trump: ‘Iran cannot blackmail US with strait of Hormuz’

Donald Trump has warned Iran not to “blackmail” the US with its flip-flopping on the status of the strait of Hormuz, after Tehran reversed its decision to reopen the waterway to shipping.

But the US president again struck a positive tone that a deal with Iran could be possible.

“They [Iran] got a little cute, as they have been doing for 47 years,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

“We’re talking to them. They wanted to close up the strait again – you know, as they’ve been doing for years – and they can’t blackmail us.”

He added: “It’s going actually along very well, and we’ll see, but we’ll have some information by the end of the day.”

Iran ‘considering new proposals put forward by US’

Iran’s supreme national security council, the country’s highest decision-making body under the supreme leader, said it is reviewing “new proposals” put forward by the US, according to Iranian media.

In a statement carried by the semi-official Tasnim news agency, the Iran security council said the Pakistani army chief, Asim Munir, who has just concluded a three-day trip to Iran, relayed new proposals put forward by the US, which Tehran “is considering and has not yet responded to”.

It added that it will resume control over the strait of Hormuz “until the end of the war is definitively concluded”, warning that as long as the US naval blockade of Iranian ports continues, Tehran will “regard it as a breach of the ceasefire and will prevent the conditional and limited reopening of the strait of Hormuz”.

UKMTO reports further attack and suspicious activity near strait of Hormuz

The UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) has issued two further alerts relating to attacks and suspicious activity near the strait of Hormuz.

UKMTO said it received a report of a container ship “being hit by an unknown projectile” about 25 nautical miles north-east of Oman. It said some of the containers were damaged but no fire or environmental impact were reported.

In a separate alert, UKMTO said it received a report of suspicious activity about three nautical miles east of Oman, after a captain of a cruise ship spotted “a splash in close proximity of the vessel”.

Earlier today, UKMTO said it received a report that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) ships had fired at a tanker near the strait.The ship’s captain reported that the crew was safe, UKMTO added.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is asking if anybody has “looked at how badly the country of Spain is doing”.

While Spain has been especially critical of the US – with Trump responding in kind – over its decision to go to war with Iran, it is not clear what has brought on the US president’s latest verbal attack against the country.

The Spanish government is hosting a “Global Progressive Mobilisation” summit of left-wing leaders from across Europe and Latin America in Barcelona this weekend. While Trump was not specifically mentioned in public remarks, the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said: “We all see the attacks against the multilateral system, the repeated attempts to undermine international law and the dangerous normalisation of the use of force.” This is being widely interpreted as a swipe at Trump, particularly when Sánchez has not held back in previous comments about the US president.

In a post on his Truth Social network, Trump said:

Has anybody looked at how badly the country of Spain is doing. Their financial numbers, despite contributing almost nothing to NATO and their military defense, are absolutely horrendous. Sad to watch!!!”

The Guardian