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Iran’s state-owned Press TV says the regime has rejected a list of points sent by the Trump administration via an intermediary in a bid to get peace talks going. Tehran has mocked the Trump administration for “negotiating with yourselves” but said earlier it was reviewing terms for potential negotiations.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that talks between Washington and Tehran are ongoing. She warned that President Trump would “unleash hell” if a peace deal isn’t made.
While Iran and Israel continue trading strikes and the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed, markets appear to have taken hope in Mr. Trump’s optimism. But oil prices rose and stocks were mixed Thursday as investors tracked mixed developments in the war.
Amid the market tumult, concerns have been raised about possible insider trading after an unusual spike in oil futures transactions just before Mr. Trump announced talks with Iran.

1:03 AM / March 26, 2026
Hezbollah rejects truce talks as Israel presses Lebanon strikes
Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem said negotiations with Israel under fire would amount to “surrender,” as the Iran-backed group launched attacks and Israel said it was expanding a “buffer zone” inside Lebanon.

In an attempt to put an end to the fighting, Lebanon’s president is calling for unprecedented direct negotiations with Israel, which has so far rebuffed his proposal.

Hezbollah chief Qassem said Wednesday his group would have none of it: “When negotiations with the Israeli enemy are proposed under fire, this is an imposition of surrender.”

Israel, which occupied southern Lebanon for some two decades until 2000, has kept up strikes on its northern neighbor and sent ground troops to take control of a strip up to the Litani River, around 20 miles from the border.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military had already “created a genuine security zone” and was expending it, pushing deeper into Lebanon.

“We are simply creating a larger buffer zone” that could prevent a ground invasion of Israel and missile attacks, Netanyahu said in a video shared by his office.

Hezbollah meanwhile issued dozens of statements claiming attacks on Israeli forces and said it also launched missiles early on Thursday at military sites in central Israel, where air raid sirens sounded. Israeli media said six Hezbollah rockets headed for central areas were all intercepted.

Hezbollah said its fighters had launched more than 80 attacks on Wednesday, the largest daily number in the current war, and attacked Israeli forces in nine border towns.

After President Trump backed off his threat to “obliterate” Iran’s energy infrastructure if it refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping lane remains effectively closed to vessels not granted explicit permission by Tehran.

As the U.S. and its allies weigh how to get oil and other critical supplies moving through the strait again, there’s a growing question: Even with thousands more U.S. forces heading for the region, can any military force do the job?

The four-year war still raging in Ukraine suggests the answer may be, no.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s military presence on the Black Sea was dwarfed by Russia’s, but Kyiv managed to push back one of the world’s most powerful fleets.

Using exploding sea and aerial drones and missiles launched from land, Ukrainian forces have damaged or destroyed numerous Russian ships and forced others away from key areas in the sea.

In April 2022, Ukraine sank the flagship of Russia’s formidable Black Sea Fleet, the missile cruiser Moskva, using Ukrainian-made missiles. Since then, Ukraine has launched a number of devastating attacks on Russian ships, often using much cheaper drones.

“Ukraine doesn’t really have a navy,” Yaroslav Trofimov, a Ukrainian-Italian author, Middle East expert and chief foreign-affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, told CBS News. Nonetheless, he said, Ukraine has “been able to prevent the Russian Black Sea Fleet from even entering the western half of the Black Sea.”

And Ukraine’s disruption of Russian activity has not stopped at its warships. According to U.N. data, Moscow’s grain exports fell by more than half at one point as its ports on the Black Sea were effectively shut down for months.

Ukraine did not take control of the Black Sea, but it made parts of it too dangerous for Russia to use.

President Trump has said repeatedly that Iran’s navy is “gone,” destroyed in the war, but Iran appears to be taking a page right out of Ukraine’s playbook when it comes to the Strait of Hormuz.

Even before the current conflict, U.S. military officials had acknowledged what the war in the Persian Gulf has made painfully clear: In modern asymmetrical warfare, large, expensive ships can be big targets for cheap, unmanned weapons.

Portuguese police have arrested a former French police officer suspected of killing his partner and his ex-girlfriend after kidnapping them and their children.

Cedric Prizzon, a one-time member of the Paris police and a former rugby league youth international, is also a fathers’ rights activist who had been involved in a bitter public custody battle with his former partner.

He had been stripped of his custody rights and had already been already convicted of harassing his former partner, after he illegally took their son to Spain for several weeks in 2021.

Portuguese police said they found “two bodies buried… in an isolated place” late Wednesday, a day after stopping the 42-year-old Prizzon in a car near Meda in the north of the country with his two children, a 12-year-old boy oand an 18-month-old baby girl.

Officers found a pump-action shotgun, fake documents and number plates, and about $20,000 in cash in the vehicle, the National Republican Guard (GNR) said in a statement on social media, which included a photo of the seized items.

Portuguese police said that the two found bodies were of the “partner and ex-partner” of the suspect, but that “procedures to identify the victims and consolidate the evidence are ongoing.” The High Council for the Judiciary on Thursday identified the victims as Audry Cavalier and Angela Cadillac, the Reuters news agency reported.

A court in Vila Nova de Foz Coa, not far from where Prizzon was detained, remanded him in custody on Thursday evening after several hours of questioning.

He is suspected of aggravated homicide, desecrating a corpse and kidnapping, judicial officials said.

The two children are to be returned to France, authorities said.

A judge prohibited Prizzon from contacting the two children, “including telephone, social media, email, written messages, or through third parties,” Reuters reported.

The U.S. may have dropped anti-tank mines over a village in southern Iran, the open-source research group Bellingcat reported Thursday, as images posted on social media appeared to show American BLU-91/B scatterable anti-tank landmines in the southern suburbs of Shiraz.

Iranian state media reported that “explosive packages” slightly larger than tuna cans had been dropped by aircraft over the area, and that some had exploded after being handled.

Several people were killed by the devices, Iranian state TV said, and it urged members of the public to report the items’ locations to authorities and not touch them.

CBS News was unable to independently verify the images, and U.S. Central Command declined to comment when asked if the U.S. had deployed the munitions.

Bellingcat cited three independent weapons experts as saying the munitions shown by Iranian state media appeared to be BLU-91/B mines, which are delivered by American Gator anti-tank mine systems. It noted that the U.S. is the only party in the Iran war known to have Gator Scatterable Mines, the system that uses the BLU-91/B devices.

BLU-91/B anti-tank mines are designed to be triggered by a large vehicle driving by and disrupting the mine’s magnetic field, Richard Weir, a senior adviser in the Crisis, Conflict and Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, told CBS News.

Weir warned, however, that the mines could be detonated by other types of vehicles, and they have a self-destruct setting which could mean they explode hours or even days after being dropped.

An American-born Israeli soldier was killed in combat in southern Lebanon, Israeli officials said Sunday.

Sgt. Moshe Yitzchak Hacohen Katz, 22, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, according to a post from the Israel Defense Forces. He was posthumously promoted from corporal to sergeant, the military said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Katz enlisted in the IDF’s Paratroopers Brigade after moving to Israel. He did not specify how long Katz had been serving. The IDF said that Katz was a member of its 890th Battalion.

“On behalf of all citizens of Israel, we embrace the family of the late Moshe in their difficult time and wish a speedy and complete recovery to our soldiers who were injured in that incident,” Netanyahu said in a statement. “May his memory be blessed.”

Rabbi Yehoshua Hecht, Katz’s great-uncle, told Israel’s Army Radio station that his great-nephew was a “very special young man” who “enjoyed every moment of life,” according to the Associated Press. Hecht described Katz as religious and a good student.

The military did not specify how or where Katz died except to say that it was in combat in southern Lebanon, where Israel has been fighting a second front parallel to its joint operation in Iran with the United States. Israel has engaged in combat with the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. Five Israeli soldiers have died in combat in Lebanon since the start of March, according to the Associated Press.

The United Nations’ refugee agency has warned that Lebanon is facing a humanitarian crisis that may become a “catastrophe.” One in five residents of the country, or a million people, have fled their homes, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Israel has told civilians in dozens of towns and villages across southern Lebanon to flee as it attacks alleged Hezbollah sites.

According to the independent National Institute for Security Studies in Israel, at least 1,116 people have been killed during the Israeli attacks in Lebanon since the war in Iran began.