A trilateral mediation team led by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt circulated a draft document of “framework principles” to Iranian and U.S. delegations in Islamabad on Wednesday, the most concrete diplomatic step since the war began in early March and a sign that back-channel contacts of the past ten days have begun to produce a shared vocabulary.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, who is chairing the proximity talks at the Foreign Office’s Diplomatic Enclave, told reporters after an evening session that the parties had “moved from grievance to architecture,” and that all three mediating governments were prepared to act as guarantors of any halt in hostilities. He declined to release the text, citing what he called “extreme sensitivity at this stage,” but confirmed that it ran to roughly nine pages and addressed five clusters of issues: a phased cessation of strikes, monitoring of the Strait of Hormuz, suspension of attacks on civilian energy infrastructure, the status of detained foreigners, and a vague but deliberate placeholder on what diplomats are calling “post-hostilities arrangements.”

The document does not yet bind anyone. Officials from three of the delegations described it as a non-paper, meaning it carries no formal authorship and can be amended or disowned. Even so, both the Iranian and U.S. delegations agreed to take it back to their capitals overnight for review, a step that participants said had been unthinkable as recently as last weekend.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, leading the Iranian team, signaled in unusually measured language that Tehran was prepared to “discuss a conditional halt” if guarantees on Israeli strikes against nuclear facilities and on the unfreezing of certain financial channels could be secured. “We are not negotiating surrender, and we are not negotiating in defeat,” Araghchi said in a brief statement at the Iranian embassy. “We are listening because the mediators are serious and because our position permits it.”

The U.S. delegation, led by Deputy Secretary of State Caroline Whitman, was more reserved. American officials traveling with her said Washington’s posture remained “cautious and conditional,” and that any pause in strikes against Iranian assets would need to be matched by verifiable steps on Houthi attacks against shipping and on Iranian-aligned militias in Iraq, where a rocket strike near Ain al-Asad airbase on Tuesday wounded three U.S. service members. Whitman herself declined to characterize the talks beyond saying they were “useful and not yet conclusive.”

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan and Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty arrived in Islamabad on Tuesday night and joined the second day of sessions Wednesday morning. The Saudi role has been pivotal, according to two diplomats briefed on the process, because Riyadh has continued to intercept Houthi launches over its airspace while simultaneously keeping working channels open to Tehran through the 2023 normalization track. Abdelatty, for his part, brought a separate brief on civilian energy infrastructure, drawing on Egyptian concerns about strikes that have rippled through regional gas supply.

Diplomats described the draft’s most innovative section as a “sequenced quiet” — a 96-hour synchronized stand-down during which Iran would suspend ballistic and drone launches, the U.S. and Israel would suspend offensive strikes on Iranian soil, and the Houthi leadership in Sanaa would suspend launches over the Red Sea. The stand-down would be monitored from a temporary cell in Muscat, with Omani officers chairing. Only after the 96 hours, the draft proposes, would the parties open negotiations on a formal ceasefire.

“It’s an off-ramp dressed as a test,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst with the Levant Policy Forum. “Each side gets to see whether the other can actually deliver — Iran on its proxies, the Americans on the Israelis. If they can hold for four days, the political cost of walking away from a longer ceasefire becomes much higher.”

Israel was not present in Islamabad and has not commented publicly on the framework, a silence that the U.S. delegation has signaled it is working to manage. A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal coordination, said Washington had briefed Israeli counterparts on “the contours but not the text” and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office had asked for further consultations before any U.S. commitment. The same official said the administration believed Israeli concerns about residual Iranian nuclear capacity could be “addressed inside the framework, not outside of it.”

The talks have unfolded against a backdrop of continuing violence. Israeli aircraft struck what the Israeli Defense Forces described as a missile production facility near Isfahan in the early hours of Wednesday. Iran’s state news agency IRNA reported one death and several injured. Houthi forces claimed a drone launch toward a tanker in the southern Red Sea; the U.S. Fifth Fleet said the drone was intercepted. U.S. casualties from the broader war passed 360 this week, according to a Pentagon tally released Tuesday evening.

Markets responded to the Islamabad signals before the day’s strikes were tallied. Brent crude, which has eased steadily since OPEC+ announced a 1.5 million-barrel production hike at its emergency session in Vienna last week, fell another $2.40 to settle at $106.10 a barrel. “Investors are pricing a non-zero chance of a ceasefire by month’s end,” said John Reilly, a commodities analyst at Citi. “That’s a meaningful shift from where the curve was sitting on April first.”

Pakistani officials said a third day of sessions was scheduled for Thursday and that the mediators expected to receive written reactions to the framework principles by Friday morning. Dar said additional steps, including the possible expansion of the talks to include an Iraqi observer and a representative from the Sultanate of Oman, would be announced as the parties responded.