G7 moves to ease fuel crisis as Trump’s security team holds secret Camp David talks on Iran, Yemen wars

The Group of Seven agreed Friday to release 100 million barrels of diesel and crude oil reserves to calm a worsening global fuel crisis, even as fresh attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and an intensifying Saudi-Houthi conflict in Yemen underscored how far the region remains from any resolution.

French President Emmanuel Macron chaired a video conference of G7 leaders, convened after a conversation with President Donald Trump, aimed at coordinating a response to soaring fuel prices across Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States. Trump welcomed the resulting agreement and said Washington would not move forward with a threatened diesel export ban, a reversal that came after the US had pressured European allies to tap their own strategic reserves. The announcement followed Washington’s push the previous day, when Trump said Europe had agreed to release what he called a massive amount of diesel stocks.

Behind the public diplomacy, Trump’s senior national security officials gathered Friday for unannounced, closed-door talks at Camp David covering both the Iran war and the escalating Saudi-Houthi conflict in Yemen, according to a wire service report citing three American officials. Vice President JD Vance chaired the hours-long session, which also included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, special envoy Steve Witkoff, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Dan Caine. One official said the meeting produced either resolution or extended discussion on a number of unspecified issues.

Maritime security in the Gulf deteriorated further overnight. Britain’s maritime trade agency said two oil tankers were struck by unidentified projectiles in the Strait of Hormuz region, the latest in a series of attacks along a waterway that once carried roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas before the US-Israeli war on Iran began in late February. Iran has maintained a blockade on commercial shipping through the strait, firing on vessels it says crossed without authorization, while Washington has responded with its own counter-blockade targeting Iranian ports to curb Tehran’s oil exports. Flight operations at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport also suffered delays and cancellations Friday amid reported ballistic missile attacks on Saudi Arabia’s Asir region, according to Iranian state media, while satellite imagery circulating online appeared to show a large fire burning in Riyadh.

Fighting in Yemen showed no sign of slowing. Yemen’s internationally recognized army said its forces carried out 474 operations across multiple fronts in 24 hours, claiming to have killed or wounded 1,540 Houthi fighters, with the heaviest toll reported in Taiz province. The Houthis countered that Saudi-led coalition forces had launched 94 strikes against their positions over the same period, putting the cumulative total since the war resumed at 1,350 strikes. The Saudi-led coalition said separately it intercepted and destroyed three ballistic missiles the Houthis fired toward the southern city of Khamis Mushait. Displacement from the renewed fighting has climbed toward 200,000 people since military operations intensified in July, according to government figures, with the UN’s World Food Programme warning that Yemen’s hunger crisis threatens to become, in the words of one official, absolutely devastating given the agency’s limited resources and restricted access to affected areas.

The aviation scare that rattled the region earlier this week also produced its first concrete resolution Friday, as the first Israeli repatriation flight from the United Arab Emirates landed in Tel Aviv following the suspension of services after Wednesday’s flydubai incident, in which a co-pilot allegedly assaulted the aircraft’s captain before passengers and crew subdued him and forced an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.

Away from the battlefield, regional diplomacy continued on several tracks. Jordan’s King Abdullah II urged US Secretary of State Rubio in a phone call to pursue a comprehensive regional de-escalation agreement guaranteeing Arab states’ security and sovereignty, pointing to recent talks in France aimed at bolstering the Lebanese army. Iraq finalized an agreement with Iran allowing Iranian airlines, excluding Mahan Air, to operate 40 daily flights to Najaf International Airport to support pilgrimage and humanitarian travel, a deal welcomed publicly by senior Iraqi cleric Ammar al-Hakim, who called for reopening all airports between the two countries. Iraq separately opened talks with Turkiye on a long-term oil and gas cooperation framework, while Iraq’s foreign minister told US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that Baghdad remains committed to keeping decisions over war and peace solely in the hands of the state.

Inside Iran, authorities executed a man convicted of firing on police during anti-government protests that peaked in January, part of what rights monitors describe as an intensifying pattern of executions tied to that unrest. A senior Revolutionary Guard commander said separately that Iran’s armed forces have made significant technological advances across ground, air, air defense and naval capabilities and have what he called surprises in store for the country’s adversaries. In Washington, the Pentagon moved to formalize lessons from the conflict, with the Secretary of War ordering the department’s chief technology officer to launch a study, titled Project Meridian, examining the future of warfare, citing what a memo described as the unmatched technological prowess demonstrated in US operations against Iran and warning the department cannot take its current advantages for granted.

With G7 nations now moving in tandem to blunt the economic fallout of the war even as fighting continues to spread across Yemen, the Gulf and Iranian airspace, the combination of secret high-level strategy sessions in Washington and emergency energy coordination in Europe signals that the conflict’s seventh month is producing no clearer path to resolution, only an expanding set of fronts for policymakers on multiple continents to manage simultaneously.