Negotiators wrapped a third and final session in Doha late Friday on the prisoner exchange scheduled to begin shortly after dawn Saturday, settling the names, the order of release and the air bridge that will carry roughly forty foreign nationals out of Iran and return a smaller number of Iranian and Hezbollah-affiliated detainees from American and Israeli custody, in what officials on three continents called the most consequential operational test of the two-day-old Islamabad ceasefire.

The framework, confirmed by four diplomats with direct knowledge of the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity because the document remains unpublished, will move detainees through Doha’s Hamad International Airport in three sequenced waves over an estimated nine hours. Qatari Emiri Air Force C-17 transports will operate the first leg out of Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport beginning at 06:30 local time, with Iranian and Hezbollah-affiliated detainees flowing in the opposite direction aboard separate aircraft to avoid any tarmac contact between the two groups.

“We have an agreement on every name, on every sequence, on every aircraft,” Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, told reporters at the Diwan late Friday after the closing session. “Tomorrow morning, with God’s help, families will receive their loved ones. That is the only metric that matters to us.”

Among the foreign nationals expected to leave Iran are seventeen Americans, six Britons, four Germans, three French citizens, two Australians, two Canadians and a small number of South Korean, Japanese and Indian nationals, according to a State Department official briefing reporters on background in Washington. The group includes consular detainees held since well before the war, dual nationals arrested during the March escalation, and three crew members from a Greek-flagged tanker boarded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the Strait of Hormuz on March 14. Iran is also expected to hand over the remains of nineteen U.S. service members killed in strikes on the Al Asad and Erbil bases, packed in flag-draped transfer cases for a separate honor-guard movement through a hangar reserved for the purpose.

In return, the United States and Israel will release a smaller cohort whose composition has been the most contested element of the talks. American officials confirmed the release of eleven Iranian nationals held on sanctions-evasion and export-control charges, two of whom had been awaiting trial in federal courts in the Southern District of New York. Israel will release fourteen prisoners, including six Hezbollah-affiliated detainees captured during the northern-border phase of the war and a smaller number of Iranian Quds Force operatives apprehended in third countries. No prisoners convicted of crimes involving the deaths of Israeli citizens are included, an Israeli official said, calling that line “absolute and non-negotiable.”

The exchange has been the principal task of the Doha track since Tuesday, when senior Qatari, American, Iranian, Israeli and Omani negotiators began closed sessions at the Sheraton complex on West Bay. Pakistani and Egyptian observers, who had carried the Islamabad mediation, participated as guarantors. Swiss diplomats representing the U.S. Interests Section in Tehran joined to handle final verification of the American list, and a small International Committee of the Red Cross team flew in Thursday to oversee the physical transfers and post-release medical screenings.

“This was an exchange, not a tribunal,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a telephone interview Friday evening. “Both sides had to swallow names they did not want to swallow. That is how prisoner deals close. The fact that it is closing on the third day after the ceasefire takes effect, rather than on the thirtieth, is a real signal that the political will at the top is still intact.”

President Donald Trump, speaking briefly to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon after meeting with the families of three of the American detainees, called the impending release “the most beautiful homecoming we could ask for” and said he expected to be at Joint Base Andrews on Saturday evening for the arrival of the first U.S. military transport carrying the freed Americans. The president declined to take questions on the Iranian detainees being released in return, saying only that “every president has to make hard calls, and this one is the right call.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, in a statement carried by the state news agency IRNA Friday night, framed the handover as “the return of our citizens unjustly held by hostile powers” and made no reference to the larger number of foreign nationals leaving Iranian territory. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said only that “appropriate operational security” would surround the Israeli portion of the transfer and that the cabinet had ratified the final list at a closed session Thursday night.

The Doha agreement also resolved a procedural argument that had threatened to delay the handover by 48 hours, according to two diplomats familiar with the talks. Iranian negotiators had pressed for the simultaneous lifting of a narrow set of humanitarian-related sanctions, particularly those affecting medical imports, as a condition of moving the foreign nationals. American negotiators refused to link sanctions language to the prisoner exchange, citing the broader U.S. position that the sanctions architecture would be addressed in a separate post-war track. The compromise, the diplomats said, was a non-binding side letter signed by Qatar and Switzerland committing both parties to “expedited review” of pending medical-import licenses within thirty days, with no signature by U.S. or Iranian officials.

The exchange will unfold against a backdrop of sporadic but limited ceasefire violations that have so far been absorbed without rupture. A Houthi launch from northern Yemen earlier in the week fell harmlessly into the Red Sea, and a single rocket fired from western Iraq toward an American base in eastern Syria caused no casualties. United Nations observers deployed along the Strait of Hormuz reported no incidents involving signatory parties as of Friday evening, and insurance underwriters at Lloyd’s of London confirmed the previously announced 50 percent reduction in Gulf war-risk premiums had taken effect at 00:00 GMT Thursday.

Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst with the Carnegie Middle East Center, said Saturday’s logistics would matter as much as the politics. “Two parallel aircraft on the same tarmac at the same airport with twelve hours of choreography between them, and one mistake or one delay becomes a headline that the ceasefire is breaking,” Hassan said. “Qatar has done this kind of work before, but it has never done it on quite this scale and never with this level of scrutiny. If it goes cleanly, the next track in Islamabad gets a great deal easier.”

Officials in Doha said a follow-on diplomatic round on war-cost accounting, the reopening of Iranian commercial airspace and the eventual sequencing of sanctions discussions would be convened in Muscat early next week, with Qatari and Omani mediators rotating roles. A senior State Department official said additional confidence-building measures would be announced once the Saturday handover was complete.