LIVE War in the Middle East: Iran responds to new American strikes…

Israeli and Russian security forces have been added to the UN blacklist on sexual violence committed during armed conflicts, according to an annual report by Antonio Guterres consulted Thursday by AFP.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations had already warned Israel and Russia last August of possible inclusion on this list, but the UN considers that “incidents and patterns of sexual violence” continued to be recorded in the context of the war in Ukraine and the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Ministry of Action and Public Accounts announced Thursday a new series of budgetary measures aimed at releasing nearly 4 billion euros in savings in order to deal with the financial consequences of the war in the Middle East. In detail, the executive plans to freeze 3.2 billion euros in state credits and cancel 847 million euros in spending.

These budgetary adjustments are in addition to the 2.2 billion euros in savings already announced last week, obtained thanks to the freezing of social security contribution reductions granted to companies on low salaries, the minister’s office indicated during a press briefing. telephone.

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The United States and Iran have established a framework of agreement which provides for an extension of the ceasefire by 60 days but which has not yet been validated by Donald Trump, American sources told AFP on Thursday.

The information was first revealed by the Axios site, according to which this preliminary agreement does not resolve the question of the Iranian nuclear program but opens the way to more in-depth negotiations on this subject.

The decision taken by the UN to add Israel to its list of countries and armed organizations guilty of sexual violence in times of war is “shameful and absurd”, declared Thursday the spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Oren Marmorstein.

“The UN’s shameful and absurd decision to include Israeli entities in the report’s annex (on conflict-related sexual violence) is further proof of the true nature of the Organization: a politicized and corrupt institution, which has renounced its founding principles and which engages in targeting systematization of Israel “its primary mission”, affirmed Mr. Marmorstein in a press release.

The Israeli ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, announced a little earlier that his country was suspending its relations with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, thus denouncing the not yet public decision to include Israel on this blacklist.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that he had ordered the army to ignore the terms of the ceasefire that came into force in October and take control of 70% of the Gaza Strip, according to a video broadcast by Israeli television.

“Right now, we have the (Palestinian Islamist movement) Hamas by the throat. We now control 60% of the territory of the Gaza Strip, declared Benjamin Netanyahu during a conference in an Israeli colony in the occupied West Bank, of which Channel 12 broadcast an extract on its site.

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The flow of ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz remains very limited because of the war in the Middle East, but among those passing, the share of boats not linked to Iran appears to be increasing, according to maritime data company Lloyd’s List Intelligence.

Since the start of the war triggered on February 28 by Israeli-American strikes against Iran, Tehran has orchestrated the near paralysis of the Strait of Hormuz, obstructing a large part of the hydrocarbon exports of the Gulf countries, with harmful consequences for the world economy.

But “last week, we saw ships flying Singaporean flags, Emirati (United Arab Emirates), South Korean flags, as well as a Norwegian flagged ship” crossing the Strait of Hormuz, says Bridget Diakun, analyst at Lloyd’s List Intelligence.

A Donald Trump minister announced Thursday that the United States wanted to block the operations of Iranian airlines to increase pressure on the authorities in Tehran.

“We will cut off the two Iranian airlines’ access to landing sites, refueling and ticket sales,” Finance Minister Scott Bessent said in a message on the social network X. The Treasury Secretary did not give names or details.

The United States previously placed Iran Air and Mahan Air on its list of sanctioned organizations to prohibit American companies and citizens from doing business with them.

The Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s ideological army, warned the United States on Thursday against a “firm response” in the event of a new attack, after American strikes on the south of the country.

“If this action is repeated, the American army will be exposed to a firm response,” the Guardians wrote in a press release published on their Sepah News site.

Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei says the United States and Israel are seeking to “bring the nation to its knees,” after recent clashes between these countries and Iran, the most serious since a truce came into force on April 8.

“The blind plan of the enemy, after the imposed war, economic pressures, political assaults and propaganda, is to create division and destruction in order to compensate for its military defeats, and to bring the nation to its knees,” said Mojtaba Khamenei, according to a statement written broadcast by state television.

In this message published on the occasion of the anniversary of the Iranian Parliament, the supreme leader once again called for national unity and “cohesion” of Iranians.

The Israeli army announced that it had carried out a “targeted strike” in Beirut, with a Lebanese military source reporting to AFP a strike on an apartment south of the capital. According to a Lebanese military source “the Israeli strike targeted an apartment in Choueifat”.

As a reminder, at least 14 people died this Thursday in other Israeli bombings in southern Lebanon, according to the Lebanese authorities.

The American army on Thursday condemned the strikes attributed to Iran against Kuwait, denouncing “a flagrant violation of the ceasefire”.

“Iran launched a ballistic missile against Kuwait, which was successfully intercepted by Kuwaiti forces. This flagrant violation of the ceasefire by the Iranian regime comes a few hours after the launch by Iranian forces of five drones which constituted an obvious threat to the Strait of Hormuz and its surroundings,” wrote the US military command for the Middle East (Centcom) on X, stressing that the drones were intercepted.

In a press release, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed its “strongest condemnation of the Iranian criminal attacks which targeted the territory of the State of Kuwait with missiles and drones, in a dangerous escalation”.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards had earlier announced that they had targeted an American base, without specifying which one, in retaliation for American strikes in recent days on southern Iran.

Israeli strikes left at least eleven dead and 21 injured, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, in the south of the country, where Israel “declared a new “combat zone”.

A strike targeted a building in the town of Saida at dawn, killing five people, the ministry said. Another on a car traveling in the same region left six people dead, including two children and their parents.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry strongly condemns what it describes as “violations” of the ceasefire by the United States after American strikes on the coastal city of Bandar Abbas, in the south of the country.

Iran will take “all necessary measures to defend its national sovereignty”, assures in a press release the spokesperson for the ministry, Esmaïl Baghaï, denouncing the “threatening rhetoric of American officials to against Iran and several countries in the region,” following statements by Donald Trump on Oman.

The Israeli army has just indicated that one of its soldiers was killed yesterday by a Hezbollah explosive drone near the border with Lebanon, bringing to 24 the number of deaths in its ranks since the beginning of March.

Sergeant Rotem Yanaï, 20 years old, “fell during a military operation in northern Israel,” the army said in a short press release.

The head of European diplomacy, Kaja Kallas, believes this Thursday that it is in “no one’s” interest for the war between Iran and the United States to continue at a time when Donald Trump is raising the specter of a resumption of hostilities in the event of failure of negotiations.

“They find themselves, at this very moment, in this very dangerous zone between war and peace, and it is in no one’s interest for this war to continue,” she told a meeting of Union foreign ministers European in Limassol, on the island of Cyprus.

Oil prices are jumping again and Asian stock markets are falling this Thursday after the United States and Iran both claimed to have carried out strikes despite the ceasefire in force.

Around 6 a.m. (in Paris), a barrel of Brent from the North Sea, the main international reference, increased by 3.83% to $97.20, while West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the American benchmark for crude oil, gained 3.98% to $92.21 per barrel.

This increase comes after the declines recorded on Wednesday, fueled by the hope of an imminent agreement aimed at ending the war in the Middle East, which has for months disrupted maritime traffic in the strategic Strait of Hormuz.