The trilateral mediation team in Islamabad said Saturday that Iranian and American delegations had initialed the working text of the “framework principles” document and that Israel had separately signaled, through U.S. channels, that it would not stand in the way of a joint statement, narrowing the gap to a ceasefire announcement to a matter of hours rather than days and producing the most consequential diplomatic moment of the six-week war.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, flanked by Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan and Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty at a late-afternoon briefing, said the parties had “closed the substantive distance” on every section of the document except one annex concerning Hezbollah’s missile holdings in southern Lebanon, which mediators have detached for separate handling. “We are not announcing a ceasefire today,” Dar said. “But we are now in a position where we are no longer asking whether, only when and in what words.”

Two senior diplomats with access to the talks said the initialing took place shortly after 1 p.m. local time, with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Caroline Whitman each affixing their initials to a nine-page document in the presence of the three mediators and a U.N. legal adviser. The initialing does not bind either capital; it formalizes the text the negotiators will recommend to their governments for adoption.

Israeli signal arrives through Washington

Israel, which has remained outside the room throughout the Islamabad process, conveyed its position late Friday night through a secure call between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, according to a senior State Department official who described the exchange on condition of anonymity. The Israeli message, the official said, was that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet would “not obstruct a joint statement out of Islamabad” provided that three conditions were preserved: continued U.S. intelligence sharing on residual Iranian nuclear activity, an unwritten understanding that Israel retained the right of preemptive response against an imminent threat, and a private side letter addressing missile transfers to Hezbollah.

Two Israeli officials, briefed in Jerusalem and speaking on background, confirmed the substance of the conditions and characterized the cabinet’s posture as “reluctant green light.” A spokesperson for Netanyahu’s office, asked at a Saturday evening press briefing whether Israel had agreed to the framework, said only that “Israel will speak when there is something to speak about.”

President Trump, who had been at his Bedminster property in New Jersey for the weekend, returned to the White House shortly after 7 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday and convened a meeting of the National Security Council in the Situation Room, an administration official confirmed. White House Press Secretary Jacqueline Park said in a written statement that the President had been “briefed at length on the Islamabad text” and that the administration would “make further announcements as warranted.”

Iranian process underway in Tehran

In Tehran, the Supreme National Security Council met under the chairmanship of President Masoud Pezeshkian in a session that ran past midnight Saturday into Sunday, Iranian state television reported. Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, in remarks after the session, said the council had “received the document from Islamabad with seriousness” and that any decision would be made “in the framework of national interest and revolutionary principles.” He did not commit Iran to acceptance, but the language was notably more restrained than the rhetoric that had defined Iranian state media earlier in the war.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not spoken publicly on the framework. A senior Iranian diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity at the Iranian embassy in Islamabad, said only that Araghchi had been “operating within his authority” throughout the week and that the Foreign Ministry expected to receive guidance “by Sunday morning at the latest.”

The framework, according to diplomats with access to the text, sets out a phased halt to hostilities to take effect at a date and hour to be specified in the joint statement, with monitoring conducted from a temporary cell in Muscat under Omani chairmanship, U.N. observers stationed at three crossings into the Strait of Hormuz, and joint International Atomic Energy Agency and Gulf observer access to three Iranian nuclear sites beginning within ten days. A prisoner exchange involving detained foreign nationals and remains of fallen U.S. service members is anticipated to follow within the first two weeks, with the location likely to be Doha.

Markets brace, region waits

The signals out of Islamabad reached oil markets late in the Friday New York session and dominated the open of Gulf trading on Saturday. Brent crude futures, which had traded near $103 a barrel on Friday afternoon in New York, opened sharply lower in Riyadh, touching $99.40 before recovering to settle near $101 by the close. The Tadawul All Share index closed up 2.6 percent; the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange general index rose 2.1 percent.

“Markets are now pricing a ceasefire as the base case, not as the upside scenario,” said John Reilly, an oil and geopolitics analyst at Citi in London. “If the joint statement actually lands this weekend, you could see Brent through $95 by midweek. The risk now runs the other way: a last-minute breakdown would be far more violent on the upside than it would have been a week ago.”

In Tel Aviv, residents who had grown accustomed to shelter alerts gathered along the promenade Saturday evening in larger numbers than at any point since the war began. In Tehran, state television broadcast extended coverage of the Islamabad briefings rather than its usual weekend programming. In Beirut, Hezbollah’s al-Manar television acknowledged the diplomatic movement in a brief evening segment, without commentary.

Strikes did not stop. The Israel Defense Forces confirmed strikes against what it described as drone production sites near Kashan and an air-defense node west of Esfahan in the early hours of Saturday. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force claimed a ballistic launch toward a target in Israel’s south; Israeli officials said the missile was intercepted over the Negev with no casualties. U.S. Central Command’s daily report did not log new American casualties in Iraq, the first such day in more than a week.

“This is not silence yet,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst with the Levant Policy Forum. “It is the noise of two sides reaching for the same off-ramp at the same time, which is rarer than people understand. The next 48 hours will tell us whether they actually make it.”

Mediators said a joint statement, if agreed, would be released from the Foreign Office’s main press hall in Islamabad and read by all three mediating governments in sequence. Dar said additional sessions had been scheduled through Sunday and that any further communication on the timing of an announcement would come “through the mediators, not through capitals.”