Three days after the guns fell silent across the Persian Gulf, the ceasefire between Iran and an Israeli-American coalition remained intact on Friday, with mediators in Doha announcing that the first formal prisoner exchange of the post-war phase would take place at the Qatari capital on Saturday and would include the repatriation of remains of American service members killed during six weeks of war.

Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, briefing reporters at the Sheraton Doha after a two-hour session with Iranian, Israeli and U.S. envoys, said the exchange had been finalized in the early hours of Friday morning and would proceed in two phases beginning at 8 a.m. local time Saturday. The agreement covers roughly 40 foreign nationals held by Iranian authorities, the remains of an estimated 14 American military personnel recovered from Iranian or Iraqi territory during the conflict, and an undisclosed number of Iranian and Hezbollah-affiliated detainees held by the United States and Israel.

“This is not a tribunal. This is not a settlement of accounts,” Al Thani said. “This is a humanitarian operation that the parties have agreed to conduct so that families on every side can begin to bury their dead and welcome their living. The State of Qatar will guarantee the safety and dignity of every individual transferred through Doha.”

The announcement came at the close of a week in which the cessation of hostilities, brokered in Islamabad on April 12 and effective at 00:00 GMT Wednesday, weathered two confirmed violations without escalation. U.S. Central Command on Thursday evening reported that a single short-range rocket had been fired from a location near the Iraqi town of Al-Qaim toward a coalition logistics yard inside eastern Syria, landing in open ground and causing no casualties. Earlier in the day, a Houthi-launched anti-ship missile aimed at a commercial tanker in the southern Red Sea was intercepted by the Italian frigate Carlo Margottini operating with the European Union’s Atalanta task force.

Both incidents were condemned within hours by Iran’s foreign ministry, which described the Iraqi launch as the act of “an undisciplined faction acting against the national interest” and reiterated that Tehran was using “every available channel” to enforce compliance among allied armed groups. The Houthi political bureau in Sanaa issued a statement claiming the Red Sea launch had been ordered before the ceasefire took effect, an explanation U.S. and Saudi officials publicly rejected.

“Two violations in three days, both contained, both repudiated by Tehran within hours, is not a collapsing ceasefire. It is a ceasefire under pressure that is, so far, performing as designed,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst at the Levant Policy Institute. “The question for next week is whether the prisoner exchange unlocks a posture of cooperation or simply discharges a humanitarian obligation and stops there.”

President Donald Trump, in remarks to reporters as he departed the White House for a weekend at Mar-a-Lago, said the return of American remains would be “the most important thing happening in the world this Saturday” and indicated he would order flags lowered to half-staff at federal facilities once positive identifications had been made by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System at Dover Air Force Base. “These are heroes coming home,” Mr. Trump said. “Their families have waited too long. We are bringing them back.”

A senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the still-developing operation, said a C-17 transport aircraft would depart Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar on Saturday afternoon carrying the remains directly to Dover, with full military honors planned at arrival. The official said the identification process was expected to take several weeks for some sets of remains owing to the condition of bodies recovered from missile-strike sites at Al-Asad and Tower 22.

In Tehran, Iranian state television broadcast images Friday afternoon of three of the foreign nationals expected to be released, including a French aid worker detained near the city of Tabriz in late March, a South Korean engineer arrested last year on charges his employer has called fabricated, and a dual Iranian-American academic held since 2024. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, speaking at a brief press appearance, said Iran was honoring the Islamabad framework “fully and without conditions” and called on Washington and the European Union to begin “serious discussion” of sanctions relief once the verification regime is fully operational.

The Strait of Hormuz observer mission, a 240-person United Nations deployment authorized in the Islamabad communique, reached approximately 70 percent strength by Friday evening, mission spokesperson Major-General Aurelio Mancini told reporters in Muscat. Patrol boats provided by Oman and the United Arab Emirates have begun joint sweeps with observer teams along the eastern and western shipping lanes. Maritime traffic through the strait was at roughly 82 percent of pre-war daily averages, according to data published by the Joint Maritime Information Center in Bahrain, with Iranian ports beginning a phased resumption of crude exports under a verification protocol agreed Thursday in Vienna.

Markets continued to digest the steady flow of de-escalation signals. Brent crude settled at $98.40 a barrel on the London ICE Friday, down nearly 22 percent from its mid-March peak above $125, with traders citing the combination of the OPEC+ output hike, the holding ceasefire and the prospect of restored Iranian export volumes. The S&P 500 closed at a fresh three-week high, with energy and industrial sectors leading gains.

In Israel, where the cabinet was scheduled to meet Sunday for its first full session since the ceasefire took effect, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the country would maintain “an unbroken posture of vigilance” but had begun a phased drawdown of reserve call-ups, with roughly 35,000 soldiers released to their homes Friday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose coalition has fractured publicly over the war’s end terms, made no public statement Friday but is expected to address the Knesset Monday.

Diplomats in Islamabad confirmed that the follow-on round of talks, originally scheduled to begin Saturday in tandem with the Doha exchange, has been pushed to Monday at the request of mediators to allow the humanitarian transfers to proceed without overlap. American, Iranian, Israeli, Saudi, Egyptian and Omani delegations are expected to address sequencing of war-cost accounting, civil aviation reopening and a longer-term framework for nuclear inspections under the Comprehensive Safeguards regime.

A senior State Department official said additional measures, including the formal lifting of certain wartime emergency designations on Iranian commercial shipping, would be announced after Saturday’s exchange concludes and the first batch of identifications at Dover is completed.