The Times of Israel is liveblogging Friday’s events as they unfold.

Iran’s top negotiator threatens to close Strait of Hormuz if US blockade continues

Iran will close the strategic Strait of Hormuz again if the United States continues its blockade of Iranian ports, parliament speaker and top negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf says.

“With the continuation of the blockade, the Strait of Hormuz will not remain open,” Ghalibaf writes on X, adding that passage through the waterway would depend on authorization from Iran.

Expert identifies major holes in UN report claiming 38,00 women and girls were killed in Gaza war

An American policy analyst identifies major holes in a report published Friday by the UN Women’s agency claiming that 38,000 of the roughly 71,000 Palestinians estimated killed in the Gaza war were women and children.

Israel Policy Forum senior policy associate Gabriel Epstein tells The Times of Israel that the UN agency’s 38,000 figure was derived by applying projections regarding the gender and age breakdown from early in the war, rather than using more accurate and available figures from recent months.

The proportions UN Women used to pull out girls from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry’s child category — which it defines as 17 or younger — and for adult women from the elderly category are inexplicably from the June 2024 data, not current figures, Epstein points out.

Moreover, the UN agency then took those old projections and applied them to the more up to date statistics from November 2025.

The Gaza health ministry’s own breakdown from November 2025 says 40.8% of the children killed were girls, while the UN agency report claims it is 44.6%.

For adult women too, the UN report’s percentage was higher than the more updated information provided by the Gaza health ministry — 39.9% compared to 37.2%.

“The current proportions were easily accessible from the November 2025 dataset, so this is a serious error,” Epstein says.

The latest Gaza health ministry data says 8,423 girls between the ages of 0 and 17 have been killed; 10,620 women between the ages of 18 and 59; and 1,820 elderly women above the age of 60, totaling 20,863 female deaths.

This would make up 30.32 percent of the 68,420 deaths on the health ministry’s unique death list.

The projections pushed by UN Women would imply 18,000 uncounted deaths when the more accurate number is 11,500, Epstein says.

“Basically, this is a projection on top of a projection that mixes together data and assumptions from different time periods and relies on a number of unsupported assumptions to arrive at a result that is not matched either by the existing ground data or plausible assessments of uncounted deaths in Gaza,” Epstein says.

Despite Iranian denials, Trump insists Iran’s uranium to be taken ‘back home to the USA very soon’

US President Donald Trump says Iran’s uranium will be transferred to the United States under any peace deal, adding that Washington will help Tehran dig it out from nuclear facilities hit in US strikes last year, despite the Islamic Republic’s strenuous denials that it will hand over its stockpile of enriched uranium.

“We’re going to get it by going in with Iran, with lots of excavators,” Trump says in a speech to the conservative Turning Point USA movement in Phoenix, Arizona. “We’re going to take it back home to the USA very soon.”

Trump also insists that no money will change hands as part of the deal being negotiated to end the Iran war.

USS Gerald Ford returns to Mideast as 3rd American aircraft carrier heads to region

The world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, has again entered the waters of the Middle East, two defense officials tell the Associated Press.

The Ford, which until recently was operating in the Eastern Mediterranean, transited the Suez Canal, along with a pair of destroyers, the USS Mahan and the USS Winston S. Churchill, and is now operating in the Red Sea, one official says.

Both speak on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations.

The Ford is returning to the Red Sea after more than a month in the Mediterranean following a major fire in a laundry space that forced the ship back to port for repairs. The carrier also broke the record for the longest aircraft carrier deployment since the Vietnam war this week.

The Ford’s arrival makes it the second aircraft carrier in the region in addition to the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea. The USS George H. W. Bush is also heading toward the region and is currently off the coast of South Africa, according to one defense official.

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