Israel-Iran ceasefire as it happened: Trump officials give classified briefing to US Congress over Iranian nuclear site bombings; Iran’s supreme leader says strikes on US base a ‘slap to America’s face’

Thank you for joining us today in our coverage of the war between Israel and Iran.

Here’s a look back at some of today’s developments:

• A fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran appears to be holding. US President Donald Trump has said American and Iranian officials are set to meet next week to discuss Iran’s nuclear program, but Iran’s foreign minister has denied this.
• The White House reiterated calls for Australia and its Asia-Pacific allies to raise defence spending in line with NATO commitments. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Australia was already increasing its spending to reach 2.3 per cent by 2033-34.
• US senators emerged from a classified briefing with sharply diverging assessments of Trump’s bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites, with Republicans calling the mission a clear success and Democrats expressing deep scepticism.
• Israel has stopped aid from entering northern Gaza after images circulated of masked men riding on aid trucks, according to officials. Clan leaders in Gaza said the men were protecting the aid, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he ordered the military to present a plan to prevent Hamas from taking control of aid.
• The US approved $30 million in funding for the contentious aid distribution system in Gaza, which is run mostly by American contractors and backed by Israel.
• And, overnight, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei claimed victory over Israel and said his country had “delivered a hand slap to America’s face”, in his first public comments since a ceasefire was declared.

This ends our live blog for today, but you can stay up to date with our extensive coverage of the Middle East at war.

From abroad, Iranian Kurdish dissident groups have been watching closely for signs that Iran’s theocracy could falter in its grip on the country, battered by Israeli airstrikes in the intense, 12-day war until a US-negotiated ceasefire halted the fighting.

Israel launched the strikes on June 13, drawing Iranian missiles that targeted Israel. But it was not until the US inserted itself into the war and hit Iranian nuclear sites, including with 13,600-kilogram bunker-buster bombs, that the war came to a watershed moment.

Now, with the fragile ceasefire holding and many Iranians trying to return to a normal life, questions swirl about whether and how much the war has weakened Iran’s clerical rule, in place since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

A handful of Iranian Kurdish groups – many with a distinctly militant past – have long found a safe haven in northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, but their presence has been a point of friction between the central governments in Baghdad and Tehran.

Iraq in 2023 reached an agreement with Iran to disarm the groups and move them from their bases near the border areas with Iran – where they potentially posed an armed challenge to Tehran – into camps designated by Baghdad.

Their armed bases were shut down and their movement within Iraq restricted, but the groups have not entirely given up their weapons.

Officials with two prominent Iranian Kurdish groups in Iraq told The Associated Press they are trying to organise politically to ensure that they would not be sidelined should the administration in Iran lose its hold on power.

When asked if their groups were preparing an armed uprising, they either denied it or avoided a direct response.

AP

US President Donald Trump indicated that he might be preparing to ease his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, potentially undercutting a central policy dating to his first term and provoking consternation among foreign policy hawks who argue that now is the time to escalate – not lessen – pressure on Tehran.

Days after US airstrikes that he said had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities, Trump posted on social media that “China can now continue to purchase oil from Iran”. That was a dramatic shift from May when he asserted all purchases of Iranian oil and petrochemical products “must stop, NOW!”

President Donald Trump in the White House on Thursday.Credit: Getty Images

And during the NATO summit in the Netherlands this week, he said Iran would “need money to put that country back into shape”.

“If they’re going to sell oil, they’re going to sell oil,” Trump added, in apparent disregard of policies his administration had imposed as part of a campaign intended to squelch Iran’s oil exports entirely.

The online post, made after Trump declared that Iran and Israel had agreed to a ceasefire following nearly two weeks of conflict, confounded oil traders and some members of his administration. It was yet another reminder for the president’s friends and foes alike of just how abrupt his policy swings can be.

“If there ever was a time for maximum pressure, it would be now, on the back end of a strike,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, the senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. His group has been a prominent advocate for tougher economic restrictions on Iran for years.

“Washington needs a strategy to constrain the resources and revenues available to this group to make sure they can’t build back better,” he said.

Trump initiated the stricter approach during his first presidential term after withdrawing from the nuclear accord that the Obama administration struck with Iran in 2015. Trump reinstated the policy through a National Security Presidential Memorandum weeks into his second administration.

That led to a series of fresh sanctions targeting Iran’s oil industry – the country’s top source of revenue – and its supply chains even as Washington held talks with Tehran over the latter’s nuclear program.

Now Trump could be considering new talks with Iran with the prospect of sanctions relief as a “big carrot”, according to Dina Esfandiary, the Middle East geoeconomics lead for Bloomberg Economics.

Bloomberg

Israel has stopped aid from entering northern Gaza, officials say, after images circulated of masked men riding on aid trucks as they made their way through the area.

Clan leaders in Gaza said the men were protecting aid. The men pictured were not Hamas stealing it, they said.

Security guards ride aboard trucks carrying humanitarian aid in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, on Wednesday.Credit: Bloomberg

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a joint statement with Defence Minister Israel Katz, said he had ordered the military to present a plan within two days to prevent Hamas from taking control of aid.

They cited new unspecified information indicating that Hamas was seizing aid intended for civilians in northern Gaza. A video showed dozens of masked men, some armed with rifles but most carrying sticks, riding on aid trucks.

Video and photographs from Agence France-Presse also showed men riding on aid trucks, accompanied by a United Nations four-wheel-drive. Journalists reported the men were part of an effort to protect the aid from looters.

Israeli government spokesman David Mencer told reporters that aid continued to enter from the south but did not specify whether any supplies were entering Gaza in the north.

The US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which operates aid distribution sites in southern and central Gaza, said on X that it was the only humanitarian organisation permitted on Thursday to distribute food in Gaza.

A spokesperson said the foundation was exempt from a two-day suspension of humanitarian aid deliveries into the territory.

The Israeli prime minister’s office and the defence ministry did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

The Higher Commission for Tribal Affairs, which represents influential clans in Gaza, said that trucks had been protected as part of an aid security process managed “solely through tribal efforts”. The commission said that no Palestinian faction – a reference to Hamas – had taken part in the process.

Hamas, the militant group that has ruled Gaza for more than two decades but now controls only parts of the territory after nearly two years of war with Israel, denied any involvement.

Reuters

Further to our previous post, the US has approved $30 million in funding for the contentious aid distribution system in Gaza, which is run mostly by American contractors and backed by Israel, The New York Times reports.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is relatively new to running food distribution centres on the Gaza Strip.

Palestinians carry humanitarian aid packages distributed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation on Thursday.Credit: AP

The Gaza health ministry says hundreds of people have been killed near food distribution points in the past month.

Humanitarian groups were raising the alarm about the sites since before the project’s operations began in late May, saying having only a few distribution sites – most in southern Gaza – with Israeli soldiers stationed nearby displaced residents and militarised humanitarian aid, the Times reported.

US state department spokesman Thomas Pigott, in announcing the $30 million in funding, described the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as a project that was “absolutely incredible and should be commended and supported”, the Times reported.

Pigott called for other countries to contribute funding to the group, which the United Nations has criticised, alongside many other humanitarian organisations, the Times reported.

It is reportedly the first time the US state department has publicly announced financial aid for the group.

An Israeli strike hit a street in central Gaza on Thursday, where witnesses said people were getting bags of flour from a Palestinian police unit that had confiscated the goods from gangs looting aid convoys. Hospital officials said 18 people were killed.

The strike was the latest violence surrounding the distribution of food to Gaza’s population, which has been thrown into turmoil over the past month. After blocking all food for 2½ months, Israel has allowed only a trickle of supplies into the territory since mid-May.

Palestinians carry humanitarian aid packages distributed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation on Thursday.Credit: AP

Efforts by the United Nations to distribute the food have been plagued by armed gangs looting trucks, and by crowds of desperate people offloading supplies from convoys.

The strike in the central town of Deir al-Balah on Thursday appeared to target members of Sahm, a security unit tasked with stopping looters and cracking down on merchants who sell stolen aid at high prices. The unit is part of Gaza’s Hamas-led Interior Ministry, but includes members of other factions.

Video of the aftermath showed bodies, several torn, of multiple young men in the street. The dead included a child and at least seven Sahm members, according to the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, where casualties were taken.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. Israel has accused the militant Hamas group of stealing aid and using it to prop up its rule in the enclave. Israeli forces have repeatedly struck Gaza’s police, considering them a branch of Hamas.

AP

US President Donald Trump’s call for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial to be thrown out has plunged the American leader into one of Israel’s most heated debates, unnerving some in its political class just days after they unanimously praised his strikes on Iran.

Trump’s social media post condemning the trial as a “WITCH HUNT”, and his vow that the US will be the one who “saves” Netanyahu from serious corruption charges, came just two days after he called off an Israeli bombing raid in Iran to preserve a ceasefire.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Donald Trump in the Oval Office in April.Credit: Getty Images

Both were dramatic interventions in the affairs of an ally that previous US administrations had always insisted was a sovereign nation that made its own decisions. Now the one leader nearly all Israelis seem to support has fully embraced the one who most divides them.

“With all due respect for Trump, he is not supposed to interfere in a legal process in an independent country,” Opposition Leader Yair Lapid told Israeli media.

Trump is seen by Netanyahu – and many Israelis – as the greatest friend they have ever had in the White House. He has lent unprecedented support to Israel’s claims to territories seized in war, he brokered the Abraham Accords with four Arab nations in his first term and over the weekend he ordered direct strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, which Israel views as an existential threat.

Still, even some staunch supporters of Netanyahu and Trump seemed a bit unnerved.

Simcha Rotman, a lawmaker from the far-right Religious Zionist party and one of the architects of Netanyahu’s controversial judicial overhaul, wrote on X that Netanyahu’s trial “may be an example of an accumulation of many faults” of the justice system.

“Still, it is not the place of the president of the United States to interfere in legal proceedings in Israel.”

AP

The big question following US and Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear program is: what remains of it?

US President Donald Trump has said three targets hit by American strikes were “obliterated”. His defence secretary said they were “destroyed”.

A preliminary report issued by the US Defence Intelligence Agency, meanwhile, said the strikes did significant damage to the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan sites but did not totally destroy the facilities.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said it has “seen extensive damage at several nuclear sites in Iran”, including those three. Israel claims it has set back Iran’s nuclear program by “many years”.

Officials and experts are still assessing the damage, and their evaluation could change.

Two major questions they are trying to address are where Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium is, and what is the state of the centrifuges that enrich the fuel.

AP

Thank you for following our live coverage of the conflict in the Middle East.

Here’s a quick look at some of the latest developments today:

• A fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran appears to be holding. US President Donald Trump has said American and Iranian officials are set to meet next week to discuss Iran’s nuclear program, but Iran’s foreign minister has denied this.
• The White House reiterated calls for Australia and its Asia-Pacific allies to raise defence spending in line with NATO commitments. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Australia was already increasing its spending to reach 2.3 per cent by 2033-34.
• US senators emerged from a classified briefing with sharply diverging assessments of Trump’s bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites, with Republicans calling the mission a clear success and Democrats expressing deep scepticism.
• Earlier, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth clashed with reporters over their coverage of the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites at a defiant news conference, accusing one journalist of being “about the worst”, and saying: “There’s nothing that I’ve seen that suggests that we didn’t hit exactly what we wanted to hit in those locations.”

We’ll have more live coverage of the Israel and Iran conflict through the day.

Two days after Qatar was forced to close its major airport because of a missile attack, the president of Qatar Airways has offered a glimpse of the logistical challenge the airline faced in the 24-hour period.

Badr Mohammed Al Meer called his Middle Eastern nation’s diversions of 100 planes simultaneously the “most complex” in modern history.

Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar.Credit: Getty Images

It took 24 hours to re-route more than 20,000 passengers aboard 90 flights sent away from Doha in midair. They were diverted just before Iran fired a salvo of missiles into Qatari territory on Tuesday (AEST).

Qatar’s synchronised global operation was, “in an instant, scattered into dozens and dozens of disrupted flight scenarios across continents, each with their own complexities and requirements,” Meer wrote in an open letter.

Read the full story here.