Post #5699

🔤🔤🔤🔤2️⃣ Hezbollah has not been a participant in the talks and bouts of fighting have continued throughout the most recent truce. On Wednesday an Israeli strike killed Amal Khalil, a well-known Lebanese journalist covering southern Lebanon. Separately, Trump was asked how long he was willing to wait for a peace deal with Iran and he replied: “Don’t rush me.” “Their navy is gone. Their air force is gone, their anti-aircraft is gone (…) maybe they loaded up a little bit during the two-week hiatus, but we’ll knock that out in about one day, if they did,” he added. “I want to make the best deal. I could make a deal right now (…) but I don’t want to do that. I want to have it everlasting,” Trump said. Iran has refused to attend peace talks with the US in Pakistan, a snub that Trump attributed to a lack of consensus in Tehran on negotiating strategy. The Iranian regime said it would not attend talks while the US was violating a Pakistani-brokered ceasefire, in particular during the imposition of a naval blockade. Trump agreed to an “indefinite” extension of the ceasefire on Tuesday and, despite the suspension of talks, he claimed on Thursday that the US had a firm grip on events in the strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel between the Gulf and the Indian Ocean through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquified fossil gas is transported. Iran’s current supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, appears not to be as all-powerful as his father, Ali, who was killed by Israeli missiles in the first seconds of the surprise US-Israeli joint attack on 28 February, which triggered the current conflict. Mojtaba Khamenei was also seriously wounded in the attack, but the New York Times on Thursday cited senior Iranian officials who claim that he remains “mentally sharp and engaged”. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) meanwhile appear to have greater influence in a more collective leadership, making it more hawkish overall, but it is far from clear that the regime is riven by policy disagreements. The IRGC naval command said that the two detained ships – the Greek-owned Epaminondas and the Panamanian-flagged MSC Francesca – had endangered maritime security “by operating without the necessary permits and tampering with navigation systems”, suggesting that they had turned off their location transponders. #trump#iran#khamenei#IRGC#ceasefire 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events🇺🇸