The Islamabad declaration reaches Geneva today. Vice President JD Vance and Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf are expected to sign the US-Iran memorandum on Sunday, an accord that reopens the Strait of Hormuz without tolls, extends the ceasefire 60 days across all fronts including Lebanon, and lifts sanctions to let Iran sell oil freely in exchange for compliance. Yet the signing opens with the guns still firing on its Lebanese clause: hours before the ceremony, Israeli jets struck a Hezbollah command center in Beirut's Dahiyeh after three Hezbollah drones struck northern Israel, killing one and wounding four in a residential apartment building by Lebanon's accounting. In Gaza, four Palestinians, including a 13-year-old, were reported killed over 24 hours amid continued strikes around Khan Younis and Gaza City.
Markets had already bought the de-escalation. WTI fell 3.2 percent to $84.88 and Brent 3.4 percent to $87.33 as the Hormuz premium kept draining, the VIX slid 9 percent to 17.7, and equity indexes rallied worldwide, the Nikkei up 2.8 percent, the Euro Stoxx 50 up 2.2 percent and the Hang Seng nearly 2 percent. Gold climbed 3 percent to $4,239 and silver jumped 6.2 percent to roughly $68 an ounce, both near record territory on a softer dollar and persistent central-bank and safe-haven demand.
Ukraine kept its deep-strike campaign against Russia's war economy running overnight. Long-range drones set ablaze the Azot chemical plant in Novomoskovsk, Tula region, a major producer of nitrate feedstock for Russian explosives, with the fires verified by NASA satellite tracking, while a separate swarm hit the Federal State Reserve's oil depot at Rybinsk in Yaroslavl region, a key military logistics hub; residents reported oil rain in Rybinsk and Tuapse. Follow-on strikes ignited a rail depot at Vyazma and slammed into a pontoon bridge Russian crews had thrown across the severed Chongar crossing into Crimea.
SENTINEL's board carries no compound alerts. The heaviest airlift flag has shifted to the Atlantic, seven C-17 movements from Europe into North America against six the other way, a logistics signature that squares with reporting that Washington plans to pull jets, warships and other assets out of Europe. USS Abraham Lincoln and USS George H.W. Bush remain paired in the Arabian Sea, the Nimitz holds in the Caribbean and the George Washington in the Philippine Sea, backed by a seven-hull Atlantic tanker surge. A single satellite pass flagged a 109 MW thermal anomaly at an oil refinery in Iran's southwestern oilfields.