The word lebanon is now at the center of the latest Middle East ceasefire dispute after President Donald Trump said the deal with Iran does not cover it. He framed the arrangement as a major breakthrough on Tuesday night, even as fighting and air strikes remained part of the wider crisis. In Washington, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said the ceasefire followed heavy U. S. strikes and left American troops ready if needed.
Ceasefire terms remain narrow
Trump said Iran will stop uranium enrichment and that the United States will work with Iran to dig up and remove deeply buried nuclear material. He also said many of the conditions in his 15-point ceasefire plan have already been agreed to, while warning that any country supplying weapons to Iran will face a 50% tariff on goods sold to the United States, effective immediately.
On his Truth Social account, Trump said there will be no enrichment of uranium and that the material buried under strikes last summer will be removed. In a separate post, he said weapon suppliers to Iran would be tariffed without exclusions or exemptions. The comments came as the provisional ceasefire was announced, with Tehran saying it would reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Hegseth says Iran was hit hard
Pete Hegseth said Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is “wounded and disfigured” and said Iran’s factories have been “razed to the ground. ” He added that the Pentagon has “done its part for now, ” while stressing that U. S. forces involved in the conflict remain ready.
Hegseth said Iran “begged for this ceasefire” and claimed Operation Epic Fury “decimated” Iran’s military. He said the country’s missile programme has been “functionally destroyed, ” Iran’s navy is “at the bottom of the sea, ” and that “we own their skies. ” He also said the United States carried out 800 strikes on Tuesday night, targeting Iran’s defence industrial base.
What the ceasefire does not cover
The key political message emerging from the latest statements is that the ceasefire is being described in limited terms. Trump’s remarks make clear that lebanon is not included in the arrangement he is describing, even as he presents the broader agreement as a step toward peace.
That narrow framing matters because it leaves open the question of how the wider regional conflict will develop next. For now, the immediate focus is on whether the provisional ceasefire holds, whether Iran follows through on the nuclear terms Trump outlined, and whether the situation around lebanon remains outside the deal or becomes part of the next round of negotiations.
Next moves in Washington and Tehran
Secretary of defense Pete Hegseth and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Dan Caine were due to brief the media imminently on the U. S. -Israeli war on Iran. The latest sequence of statements suggests the ceasefire is only the first stage of a larger and still unstable process. If the arrangement holds, pressure will shift to enforcement, sanctions, and the unresolved role of lebanon in the wider conflict.
