Netanyahu declares historic win, says Israel removed Iran’s nuclear threat in 12-day war

• The shaky truce between Iran and Israel appeared to hold, with both sides saying they would honour the ceasefire if the other side did the same. Earlier on Tuesday Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran would respect the ceasefire announced by Trump, provided that Israel also upholds its terms. “If the Zionist regime does not violate the ceasefire, Iran will not violate it either,” he said. Hours later, Israel’s defense minister Israel Katz said he told his US counterpart Pete Hegseth that “Israel will respect the ceasefire — as long as the other side does”.

• An initial classified US assessment of Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend says they did not destroy two of the sites and likely only set back the nuclear program by a few months, according to two people familiar with the report. The report produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency – the intelligence arm of the Pentagon – concluded key components of the nuclear program, including centrifuges, were capable of being restarted within months. The report also found that much of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could be put to use for a possible nuclear weapon was moved before the strikes and may have been moved to other secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran. The findings suggest Trump’s declaration about the sites being “obliterated” may be overstated. Read our story here.

• Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would strike again if Iran rebuilds its nuclear project. Describing his war on Iran as a “historic victory” that “will stand for generations”, the Israeli PM claimed that Israel in its 12 days of war with Iran had removed “the threat of nuclear annihilation”. He said on he had “no intention of easing off the gas pedal” and Israel “must complete” its campaign against the Iranian axis, to defeat Hamas and to bring about the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza.

• Netanyahu also declared that Israel “never had a better friend that President Trump in the White House”. His comments came only hours after Trump directed stinging criticism at Israel over the scale of strikes Trump said violated the truce with Iran negotiated by Washington, with the US president saying: “Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I’ve never seen before, the biggest load that we’ve seen. We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” Israel’s leadership was reportedly “stunned” and “embarrassed” by Trump’s harsh rebuke.

• Iranian state news reported that Iran’s air space would reopen on Tuesday night, while Israel Home Front Command said Israeli citizens could resume full activity without restriction for most of the country and Ben-Gurion and Haifa airports would return to full operations.

• Donald Trump said China can continue to purchase Iranian oil, a move the White House clarified did not indicate a relaxation of US sanctions.

• At the United Nations, France and its European partners are still prepared to reactivate sanctions on Iran if an agreement is not reached soon on its nuclear program, the French ambassador to the UN has warned.

Donald Trump’s startling outburst at Iran and Israel capped a drama-filled 24 hours for Trump, the US, the Middle East and the world. As both sides defied his ceasefire, the US president lashed out, his anger and frustration clearly visible as he swore on live television.

Trump later called Israel’s prime minister to demand he stop bombing Iran.

With the fragile ceasefire seeming to hold, there was some unwelcome news via a report from the Pentagon which said the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were not quite as successful as Trump had claimed.

That and much more is in our freshly launched daily wrap of key Trump stories:

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok produced inaccurate and contradictory responses when users sought to fact-check the Israel-Iran conflict, a study has said, raising fresh doubts about its reliability as a debunking tool.

Agence France-Presse reports that with tech platforms reducing their reliance on human fact-checkers, users are increasingly utilising AI-powered chatbots – including xAI’s Grok – in search of reliable information, but their responses are often prone to misinformation.

“The investigation into Grok’s performance during the first days of the Israel-Iran conflict exposes significant flaws and limitations in the AI chatbot’s ability to provide accurate, reliable and consistent information during times of crisis,” said the study from the digital forensic research lab (DFRLab) of the Atlantic Council, an American thinktank.

Grok demonstrated that it struggles with verifying already-confirmed facts, analysing fake visuals and avoiding unsubstantiated claims.

The DFRLab analysed about 130,000 posts in various languages on the platform X, where the AI assistant is built in, to find that Grok was “struggling to authenticate AI-generated media”.

Following Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Israel, Grok offered vastly different responses to similar prompts about an AI-generated video of a destroyed airport that amassed millions of views on X, the study found. It oscillated – sometimes within the same minute – between denying the airport’s destruction and confirming it had been damaged by strikes, the study said.

In some responses, Grok cited the a missile launched by Yemeni rebels as the source of the damage. In others, it wrongly identified the AI-generated airport as one in Beirut, Gaza or Tehran.

Israelis have responded calmly to Donald Trump’s criticisms and accusations their country had violated a truce he brokered with Iran, expressing gratitude for his mediation and relief at the conclusion of the 12-day war.

Reuters reports that earlier on Tuesday the US president admonished Israel after waking in Washington to find the ceasefire had been violated by both sides, telling the media: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

In Haifa, northern Israel, Daniel Kopylkov, a 27-year-old cook, said: “Honestly, I don’t care that much about what Trump said about Israel. At the end of the day, I think he’s the one that truly helped to bring an end to this war and that’s what’s important to me.”

Kopylkov was one of several people Reuters interviewed in Haifa, a target of Iranian missiles during the conflict. It is Israel’s third-largest city after Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and home to Israel’s busiest seaport and a naval base.

Historian Marc Volovici, 42, said Trump’s outburst underscored Israel’s dependence on US political, military and financial support.

This was just a very small but significant demonstration of how Israel relies on international legitimacy, and especially [the] American one.

A 70-year-old resident identifying herself only as Esther said:

It’s like a parent scolding the child. He’s scolding us. But it’s not anything dramatically serious. I’m not a politician, you know, I’m just feeling it like that.

Lawyer Ephraim Glazberg, 75, expressed a similar view, saying: “I think it was the agony of the moment. I don’t think this is a problem.”

Oil prices sank for a second straight day and stock markets mostly rose on Tuesday as the ceasefire between Iran and Israel appeared to be holding.

Crude futures slumped in volatile trading after Donald Trump announced a ceasefire, extending Monday’s steep losses in oil after Iran’s response to the US attack did not hit energy infrastructure, Agence France-Presse reports.

“This morning’s ceasefire further reduced the perceived threat to Middle Eastern oil supply routes,” said David Morrison, analyst at Trade Nation.

The main international and US oil contracts briefly bounced off their lows as Israel and Iran accused each other of breaking the ceasefire, but then resumed their fall after Trump berated the two countries.

Turkey’s president hailed the Iran-Israel truce and hoped it would remain in place as he held talks with Donald Trump on the sidelines of a Nato summit late on Tuesday.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “expressed his satisfaction with the ceasefire achieved between Israel and Iran through President Trump’s efforts, hoping it would be permanent”, his office said.

It said Erdoğan also stressed that Ankara and Washington should work closely together to end the war in Gaza, Agence France-Presse reported. He “emphasised the importance of close dialogue in ending the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza as soon as possible”, as well as “peacefully resolving the Russia-Ukraine war”.

Erdogan also called for increased defence industry cooperation with the US, which he said could significantly boost trade between them.

Advancing cooperation in the defence industry would facilitate achieving the goal of a $100 billion trade volume.

Donald Trump has said China can continue to purchase Iranian oil after Israel and Iran agreed to a ceasefire, a move the White House clarified did not indicate a relaxation of US sanctions.

“China can now continue to purchase Oil from Iran. Hopefully, they will be purchasing plenty from the U.S., also,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday, just days after ordering the US bombings of three Iranian nuclear sites.

Reuters cited a senior White House official as saying the US president was drawing attention to no attempts by Iran so far to close the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers, as a closure would have been hard for China, the world’s top importer of Iranian oil.

“The president continues to call on China and all countries to import our state-of-the-art oil rather than import Iranian oil in violation of US sanctions,” the official said.

After the ceasefire announcement, Trump’s comments on China were another bearish signal for oil prices, which fell nearly 6%.

Any relaxation of sanctions enforcement on Iran would mark a US policy shift after Trump said in February he was reimposing maximum pressure on Iran, aiming to drive its oil exports to zero, over its nuclear program and funding of militants across the Middle East.

“President Trump’s greenlight for China to keep buying Iranian oil reflects a return to lax enforcement standards,” said Scott Modell, a former CIA officer, now CEO of Rapidan Energy Group.

At the United Nations, France and its European partners are still prepared to reactivate sanctions on Iran if an agreement is not reached soon on its nuclear program, the French ambassador to the UN has warned.

“Time is running out,” Jerome Bonnnafont said at a UN security council meeting in reference to the October expiration of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

We expect Iran to return to talks without delay in order to achieve a robust, verifiable and lasting diplomatic solution.

Agence France-Presse reports Bonnafont also said on Tuesday said negotiations were the only way to “guarantee the impossibility of an Iranian military nuclear program”, days after the US conducted strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. He told the New York meeting:

France and its E3 partners [Germany and the UK] remain ready to use the leverage established by resolution 2231, that of a ‘snapback’ [of sanctions], if a satisfactory agreement is not reached by summer.

UK ambassador Barbara Wood concurred, saying: “We will use all diplomatic levers at our disposal to support a negotiated outcome and ensure Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon.”

• This is Adam Fulton picking up our live coverage

In the US, Democrats are up in arms over the cancellation of classified briefings to Congress scheduled for today, where White House officials were going to inform lawmakers about the bombing raid targeting Iran’s nuclear program.

“What are the facts that the Trump administration is trying to hide? The American people deserve to know the truth,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said after the briefings were canceled.

“This last-minute postponement of our briefing is outrageous. It’s evasive. It’s derelict. They’re bobbing and weaving and ducking. Senators deserve full transparency. There is a legal obligation for the administration to inform Congress about precisely what is happening,” said Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat.

It was not immediately cleared why the briefings for all members of the Senate and the House of Representatives were canceled.

On X, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson said his chamber’s briefing had been rescheduled to Friday:

I have just confirmed with the White House that the classified bipartisan briefing for all House Members will now be held on Friday. Senior Administration officials will present the latest information pertaining to the situation involving Israel and Iran.

Spokespeople for Senate majority leader John Thune did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s strikes on Iran only set back nuclear program by months, early intelligence find

An initial classified US assessment of Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend says they did not destroy two of the sites and likely only set back the nuclear program by a few months, according to two people familiar with the report.

The report produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency – the intelligence arm of the Pentagon – and first reported by CNN, concluded key components of the nuclear program including centrifuges and enriched uranium were capable of being restarted within months.

The report also found that much of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could be put to use for a possible nuclear weapon was moved before the strikes and may have been moved to other secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran.

The findings by the DIA, which were based on a preliminary battle damage assessment conducted by US central command, which oversees US military operations in the Middle East, suggests Trump’s declaration about the sites being “obliterated” may be overstated.

Trump had said in his televised address on Saturday night immediately after the operation that the US had completely destroyed Iran’s enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordow, the facility buried deep underground, and at Esfahan, where enrichment was being stored.

“The strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,” Trump said in his address from the White House.

While the DIA report was only an initial assessment, one of the people said if the intelligence on the ground was already finding within days that Fordow in particular was not destroyed, later assessments could suggest even less damage might have been inflicted.

Netanyahu declares ‘historic victory’ and claims Israel removed Iran’s nuclear threat in 12-day war

Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel in its 12 days of war with Iran had removed “the threat of nuclear annihilation”.

“We have removed two immediate existential threats to us – the threat of nuclear annihilation and the threat of annihilation by 20,000 ballistic missiles,” the Israeli PM claimed in video remarks issued by his office.

However, despite this and Donald Trump’s recent claim that Iran was “very close” to making a nuclear weapon when Israel launched its bombing campaign, Mark Warner, the vice-chairman of the US Senate intelligence committee, said last Wednesday that senators were briefed on Monday, after Israel’s attack, that US intelligence agencies still see no evidence that Iran was trying to make nuclear weapons.

In an interview with MSNBC, Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, said that Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had testified to the Senate in March “that Iran had taken no action towards, moving towards a bomb”.

“And we got reconfirmed … Monday of this week, that the intelligence hasn’t changed,” Warner added.

Back to Netanyahu today, describing his war on Iran as a “historic victory” that “will stand for generations”, he went on to say that “no intention of easing off the gas pedal” and Israel “must complete” its campaign against Iran’s axis, to defeat Hamas and to bring about the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza.

We must not ease up. We must complete the campaign against the Iranian axis, defeat Hamas, and bring about the release of all the hostages, both living and dead.