Hezbollah rejects 'partial ceasefire' as Trump denies suspension of Iran talks

Hezbollah will not accept a “partial ceasefire” with Israel, a senior official in the militant group said Tuesday, as fresh cross-border exchanges threatened to further complicate US-Iran talks on an interim ceasefire agreement.

In a written statement to AFP, Mahmoud Qomati, deputy head of Hezbollah’s political council, added that “the enemy should know that any aggression against [Beirut’s southern] suburbs could lead to a deeper and stronger response” from the group.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military partly eased restrictions in several northern communities near the Lebanese border, allowing limited school activity to resume and increasing caps on gatherings to 100 people outdoors and 400 indoors, a move that appeared to signal Israeli expectations that attacks from Lebanon would ease.

Lebanon and Israel opened two days of US-mediated talks in Washington today even as violence on the ground cast doubt on President Donald Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel a day earlier. Fighting intensified on Tuesday after Israel said its air defenses intercepted projectiles fired from Lebanon into northern Israel, while Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported new Israeli airstrikes across southern Lebanon that killed at least four people.

The flare-up threatened to spill into US-Iran diplomacy, with Iran’s Fars News Agency reporting that message exchanges between Washington and Tehran through Pakistani intermediaries had stopped for several days because of the ongoing conflict. Later on Tuesday, Trump denied the reports, describing them as “false and erroneous” and saying that conversations between the two sides have been ongoing.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that any sanctions relief for Iran would depend on nuclear concessions, including eliminating uranium enrichment entirely and dismantling Tehran’s stockpile.

“The more they give, the more they would get,” Rubio said. “What they’re not going to get is a down payment.”