Middle East crisis: Rubio says opening the strait of Hormuz is first condition in talks with Iran – as it happened

The fourth round of negotiations between Israeli and Lebanese officials have begun in Washington, according to Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA). NNA has just reported the talks “began a short while ago” at the US state department headquarters.

Lebanon’s health ministry said Tuesday that Israeli strikes a day earlier near a hospital in the southern city of Tyre killed four people and wounded 127 others, including 39 staff from the facility. The ministry statement said the wounded staff at the Jabal Amel hospital were “four doctors, 27 nurses, and eight [administrative] employees – four of whom are in critical condition and receiving treatment in intensive care”.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio told lawmakers on Tuesday that Iran had agreed to negotiate aspects of its nuclear programme that it previously refused to discuss. However, he said that was not a guarantee that talks will lead to a deal to end the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Rubio told the committee that Iran’s supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei is alive and “increasingly engaging”. “I would imagine, given what’s happened to multiple leaders in that system, being very public is probably not something that’s recommended for them internally,” he said.

Rubio said he is optimistic about the potential for a resumption in nuclear talks with Iran despite a shaky ceasefire in the war looking increasingly in doubt. “They have agreed to negotiate aspects of their nuclear program that just a month ago, just a year ago, they were refusing to even mention,” Rubio told the US Senate foreign relations committee. He did not elaborate.

The Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, said the US has backed plans to strike Beirut’s southern suburbs if Hezbollah attacks northern Israel. The remarks came after Israel appeared to pull back from immediate threats of attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs, known as Dahiyeh, following an intervention by US president Donald Trump .

German chancellor Friedrich Merz on Tuesday called on Israel to exercise restraint in its campaign in southern Lebanon, where a three-month war with Hezbollah has killed more than 3,400 and uprooted over 1.2m people. Merz said Germany viewed the latest escalation in the south with great concern and urged Hezbollah to lay down its arms.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has once again issued a warning telling people in the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh to flee their homes and move north ahead of strikes. It is the third such warning in a week for one of southern Lebanon’s largest cities, home to tens of thousands of people, which has seen continued Israeli strikes in recent weeks despite a ceasefire.

The Lebanese armed forces said two soldiers were injured “as a result of being targeted by a hostile Israeli drone” on a road between the towns of Habbouch and Deir ez-Zahrani in southern Lebanon . There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.

Lebanon’s official National News Agency (NNA) has reported at least eight deaths this morning from Israeli bombings in southern Lebanon . That is despite Donald Trump announcing an agreement to halt attacks that neither Israel or Hezbollah have publicly accepted.