Live: Israel strikes south Lebanon day after security deal

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei said on Thursday that future talks with the US would be held directly, but that did not mean "accepting its views".

“It is obvious that the face-to-face negotiations that will be held in the future will not mean accepting the enemy's point of view,” Khamenei said in a message read on state television, his first reaction to the Iran-US deal ending the war that broke out in late February.

The head of Hezbollah's parliamentary bloc, Mohammad Raad, said on Thursday that Israel's war in Lebanon had "failed" to eliminate the group.

Raad said in a statement that "the enemy's war aimed at crushing the resistance in Lebanon has failed and will not achieve its objectives".

He also called on Lebanese authorities to "adopt a framework for indirect negotiations with the enemy" to stop the fighting.

He said the Israeli military must "fully comply with the cessation of hostilities on land, at sea and in the air, and prepare for and begin withdrawal within 60 days, without any need whatsoever for direct negotiations".

An Israeli minister from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party said this week that Israel “will be at war with Syria sooner or later”.

The remarks came in a series of radio interviews given by Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli on Wednesday and Thursday, in which he outlined what he dubbed a "radical Sunni axis of evil" in the Middle East.

“There is no way that a jihadist regime rooted in Isis and al-Qaeda, whose aspiration is the unification of Jerusalem, can live in peace alongside the State of Israel,” the far-right minister said, referring to Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government. 

Speaking to Israel’s Army Radio on Thursday, Chikli outlined what he considers to be a new anti-Israel alliance made up of Pakistan, Turkey and Qatar, which he said worried him far more than Iran and its ceasefire deal with the US.

Read more: Israel 'will be at war with Syria sooner or later', says Likud minister

The US military has allowed at least 12 ships to pass through its naval blockade of Iran's ports following the signing of a memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran, Vice President JD Vance said on Thursday.

"On the blockade, Centcom has allowed north of a dozen ships to go through our naval blockade, and so we're also honouring our end of the early part of the agreement," Vance told journalists, referring to the US military command responsible for the Middle East.

The 60-day period for negotiations between the United States and Iran begins on Thursday, but the agreement between the two sides took effect the day before, Vice President JD Vance said.

"I would say the 60-day period officially started today," Vance told journalists, adding that "the deal started yesterday".

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem has denounced the “unlawful and illegitimate” Israeli seizure of its property in occupied East Jerusalem.

In a statement on Wednesday, the Patriarchate said that it "expressed grave concern over the Israeli raid and land grab targeting its Church property in Silwan".

During the operation, which took place on Monday, “the Patriarchate’s representative was forcibly removed, his equipment was confiscated, trees were uprooted, and the property was enclosed with fencing and gates”.

It said that the disputed land, which is adjacent to the Monastery of St Onuphrius, is registered under its ownership, and warned that this seizure “sets a dangerous precedent for Church rights in Jerusalem”.

Read more: Greek Orthodox Patriarchate denounces Israeli seizure of church land in Jerusalem

US Vice President JD Vance on Thursday said Israel will have to respect the peace process with Iran and that it was good for Israel, adding that attacks in Beirut that kill civilians were "not acceptable".

Vance also said he may go to Switzerland "this weekend" for talks with Iran.

On Wednesday night Britain's most notorious anti-Islam activist was hosted at the Oxford Union by a Palestinian student from Gaza who said she was upholding his right to free speech, before roundly defeating him in a debate on Islam.

Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, arrived at the debating society to speak in support of the motion "This House believes the West is right to be suspicious of Islam". It failed to pass.

The union is a globally famous institution. Many of its debates have gone down in history.

There is little doubt that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will watch this debate online when it is published later this year.

But the audience inside the chamber on Wednesday night was extraordinarily small, owing to a crowd of hundreds of protestors who had prevented people - including speakers - from entering and delayed the event by hours.

Read more: Inside the Oxford Union debate where Tommy Robinson lost to a Palestinian student from Gaza

Britain on Thursday said it was no longer advising against all but essential travel to some Gulf states, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait.

The change comes shortly after the United States and Iran signed an interim agreement to end their war.

Israelis are viewing the emerging US-Iran deal as more than just a diplomatic breakthrough between Washington and Tehran.

For many in the country's political and military elite, the agreement to end the war represents a strategic turning point that could weaken Israel's regional influence, strain its most important alliance and accelerate the political decline of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Although an agreement between the US and Iran had been widely anticipated since April, Pakistan's announcement on Sunday that a deal had been reached sent shockwaves through the country.

There's still a lot of questions about the terms of the agreement that are yet to be answered, but Israel's political and military establishment did not expect the joint US-Israeli campaign against Iran to end this way.

When Netanyahu initiated the war against Iran on 28 February, Israel's objectives appeared clear: dismantling Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programmes and bringing about the collapse of the Iranian government.

Almost four months later, none of those goals has been achieved. Instead, Iran appears to be in a stronger position than it was in February.

The country still retains its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, while its leadership appears to have emerged strengthened despite the blows Israel inflicted, including the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Read more: US-Iran deal leaves Israel isolated and Netanyahu exposed

Britain's International Development Minister Jenny Chapman called on Thursday for Israel to withdraw from southern Lebanon so that families displaced by three months of war could return to their homes.

"Israel should withdraw from southern Lebanon, absolutely. Displacement we know anywhere in the world causes huge disruption," she told Reuters while visiting a school where displaced families were sheltering. "That is why we want to get the conditions right so that people can return home and be secure, be safe and be confident they can stay in their homes for the long term."

Israeli attacks on south Lebanon killed three people on Thursday, Lebanese state media reported, hours after the US and Iran signed an agreement to end the war.

"An enemy drone targeted a car" in the Kfar Tebnit area, killing two people, the official National News Agency (NNA) reported.

In the neighbouring village of Zebdine, another drone killed one more person, NNA said.

Israel's military announced the death of one of its soldiers the night before in an incident in south Lebanon that also left seven others wounded.

The US-Iran framework agreement to end the war proves that nuclear weapons provide no strategic advantage, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican) said on Thursday.

US President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a deal on Wednesday which lays the groundwork for detailed negotiations on Iran's nuclear programme and sanctions relief for Tehran.

Ican, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its key role in drafting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), insisted the deal revealed how little advantage US and Israeli nuclear arsenals provided.

"The lesson of this war is the opposite of what the nuclear-armed states would have us believe," ICAN chief Melissa Parke said in a statement.

"Two nuclear powers attacked a country with no nuclear weapons, and it is the nuclear powers who have been forced to stop."

It was clear, she said, that "nuclear weapons bought no security and no leverage; they only brought the US to the brink of ending a civilisation".

Included in the text is a commitment from Iran that it will "not procure or develop nuclear weapons".

But that declaration merely "reaffirms what international inspectors had established long before the war that produced it: Iran is a non-nuclear-weapon state", Ican said.

It pointed out that Iran had been a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) since 1970 and "is legally bound, as a non-nuclear-weapon state, not to acquire nuclear weapons, while also being subject to the safeguards mechanisms of the International Atomic Energy Agency".

At the same time, Ican highlighted that "Israel remains the only state in the Middle East with nuclear weapons".

Israel, it said, was known to have around 90 nuclear weapons and remains outside both the NPT and the TPNW.

"A durable peace requires confronting the arsenal that actually exists, rather than concentrating enforcement on the state that has none," it said.

Ican voiced hope that governments would "draw the right conclusion from a war in which nuclear weapons proved both dangerous and strategically irrelevant".

US President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to end a war that has devastated the Middle East since late February.

The White House has confirmed the digital signing, noting that an initial phase of the agreement was signed on Sunday by US Vice President JD Vance and Iran's chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, with President Trump witnessing.

Trump had previously announced that both sides had agreed on the deal on 14 June.

Trump told reporters that he had signed the memorandum at the Palace of Versailles, near Paris, where he was attending the G7 Summit ahead of a dinner hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron. 

Macron shared a video on social media showing the moment Trump signed the document, in which Trump said: "This was not easy."

Both sides have 60 days, extendable by mutual consent, to negotiate a final comprehensive treaty. 

Trump was blunt about the consequences of a breakdown in talks. "If it doesn't get done in 60 days, that's all right. We go back to bombing," he said. "I don't want to do that, because it's so good, but we might have to, because we're never going to let them have a nuclear weapon."

Read more: Trump and Iran sign interim ceasefire deal in France

The transit of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz still needs to be done in coordination with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) navy, Iranian state television said on Thursday. 

Vessels have begun moving through the strait following the signing of a deal to bring the US war on Iran to a close.