Trump's plan to pay for the war's damage to shipping with Iran's own money now has a price attached to it. Ebrahim Zolfaghari, spokesman for Iran's Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, the joint command that runs the armed forces in wartime, said on Tuesday that ships belonging to companies and countries that accept payment out of Iran's frozen assets will not be allowed through the Strait of Hormuz. He called the scheme unlawful. Anadolu Ajansı and Al Jazeera both carried the statement.

The latest. Benjamin Netanyahu's White House meeting has ended. It ran 90 minutes behind closed doors on Tuesday 28 July 2026, and Israel had issued no readout by the evening in Türkiye.

The offer Zolfaghari was answering came from Washington days earlier. Trump said any damage to ships and cargo during the continuing attacks on Iran would be made good out of frozen Iranian assets under American control. Tehran's answer converts that offer into a test: take the money, lose the passage.

Iran's position has been that the strait is shut, and its foreign ministry said so again this week. What Tuesday's statement adds is a named category of ship that will not be let through, defined by whose money its owner has accepted. It is a blockade that sorts by ledger.

Israel's defense minister spent the same day describing an arrangement Washington has not confirmed. "US fighter jets are taking off from Israel to launch attacks on Iran, and the Iranians know that," Israel Katz told the broadcaster Channel 14. He said Israel wants to hit Iranian energy targets and cannot: "We strongly want to attack Iranian energy targets, but the US does not agree to that at this stage." He added that Israel is ready to strike Iran on its own and would answer any Iranian fire "with full force." There was no immediate Iranian comment, and no American confirmation that its aircraft are flying from Israeli bases.

Read those two sentences together and Katz has described a war in which his country provides the runway and Washington holds the veto.

Then there is the guest. Hours before the meeting, Trump used a Fox News interview to criticize Netanyahu for the second day running, this time over Pickaxe Mountain, the fortified underground site south of Tehran that Al Jazeera has described as tunnel complexes dug beneath hundreds of meters of granite. Netanyahu should have raised it privately, Trump said, and he suggested the prime minister had gone public to keep Washington in the conflict. "I don't need Bibi to tell me." He said the United States knows "exactly what's going on" at the site and would "take it out very easily" if Iran fails to reach an agreement.

The day before, the subject was Türkiye. Trump brushed aside Netanyahu's reported objections to American arms sales to Ankara, called Türkiye an important ally and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan a friend, and said nobody dictates to him what the United States may sell.

That is twice in two days that Trump has publicly waved off something his guest wanted, and one of the two was about weapons for Türkiye.

Then the two of them went behind a closed door. Netanyahu reached the West Wing at 10:57am Washington time and the talks, shut to the media, ran 90 minutes. Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokesperson, said Trump's meetings with Netanyahu and with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier the same day had both been "positive and productive." Israel did not immediately issue a readout of its own. The White House had told Anadolu Ajansı a day earlier that the agenda was the war with Iran, the Israel-Lebanon security framework and widening the Abraham Accords, and it was the eighth time the two men have met since the US president returned to office.

Ankara is not in this war and is exposed to it anyway. Türkiye imports almost all of the energy it uses, and Iran still fills its gas pipeline. When the strait closed in March 2026 the damage did not show up where it was expected: ports, exports and the central bank's own reading all indicated Turkish foreign trade kept moving. The exposure was always the bill.

Tehran has attached a condition to Trump's offer. The first owner to accept the money will find out whether the threat is real.