ISLAMABAD — Pakistani, Saudi and Egyptian mediators worked through the night on a draft joint statement aimed at halting the six-week Iran war, narrowing the text to a handful of unresolved clauses on verification and the status of Iran-aligned armed groups, three officials briefed on the talks said Saturday, as Iranian and U.S. delegations remained in the Pakistani capital and Israeli envoys conferred from a nearby villa.

The flurry of activity, conducted behind unmarked security cordons in the diplomatic enclave, has fed a cautious sense among Western capitals that a ceasefire announcement could come within days. Officials warned against premature claims of breakthrough, but several said the gap between Tehran and Washington had narrowed enough that, for the first time since the war began on March 1, both delegations were debating the same paragraph rather than talking past each other.

“We are no longer trading speeches. We are trading commas,” said Bilal Anwar, a senior adviser to Pakistan’s foreign ministry, in a brief statement to reporters outside the talks venue shortly before dawn. “That is a different kind of difficult, and a more useful kind.”

The session, which began Friday afternoon and stretched past sunrise, focused on a four-page text titled provisionally the “Islamabad Framework,” according to two diplomats familiar with its drafting. The document, an outgrowth of the “framework principles” circulated last week, would commit Iran and Israel to a phased halt of direct strikes, route Houthi and Iraqi militia compliance through an Iranian channel without naming those groups as parties, and authorize United Nations observers to monitor the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb. A separate annex, still under negotiation, would set parameters for a future verification regime covering Iran’s enrichment program.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who arrived in Islamabad on Thursday and has not left the talks compound, told reporters in a brief corridor exchange that Tehran was prepared to “test in practice” a conditional halt to missile launches at Israeli territory provided that Israeli strikes on Iranian soil also stopped at the same hour. He repeated Iran’s longstanding objection to being held accountable in writing for the actions of allied forces it says it does not command, calling such language “a trap dressed as a clause.”

A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive negotiations, said the U.S. delegation, led by Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, had presented Tehran with a “compliance pathway” that would allow Iran to demonstrate good faith by securing the silence of Houthi and Iraqi proxy forces over a 72-hour confidence-building window before any ceasefire took formal effect. “We are not asking Iran to admit it controls these groups,” the official said. “We are asking it to prove, through outcomes, that the launches stop.”

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan and Egyptian counterpart Badr Abdelatty have served as the principal bridge between the rooms, shuttling drafts and counter-drafts in what one Gulf diplomat described as “the most active mediation Riyadh has run in a generation.” Omani officials, longtime intermediaries on the U.S.-Iran channel, joined Friday evening at Tehran’s request.

The Israeli posture has been the most opaque. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not addressed the Islamabad track publicly, and his envoy in Pakistan, a former national security adviser, is not formally part of the joint sessions. But two officials familiar with the choreography said Israel had signaled it would accept the framework’s structure provided that strikes on Iran’s residual enrichment capacity could resume should verification fail, and that any released Israeli detainees be accompanied by remains of soldiers killed during the conflict.

“The Israelis are negotiating the exit door before they walk through the front door,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst at the Levant Policy Forum. “That is rational, but it is also slow. The mediators’ challenge is to keep the Iranians at the table while the Israelis insist on guarantees that look, from Tehran, like asymmetry.”

The talks have unfolded against a battlefield that has not paused. The Pentagon on Saturday confirmed that two U.S. service members were wounded in a Houthi drone-and-missile salvo against a logistics ship in the Gulf of Aden overnight, bringing the U.S. military casualty count since hostilities began to roughly 350 killed or wounded. Saudi and Emirati air defenses engaged a fresh wave of projectiles before dawn, and Israeli aircraft struck what the Israel Defense Forces described as a centrifuge components facility north of Isfahan. Iranian state media reported retaliatory missile launches toward an Israeli air base in the Negev, most of them intercepted.

Market participants, who have ridden a volatile week, treated the Islamabad signals with restraint. Brent crude, which had climbed back above $112 Friday on reports of stalled progress, slipped about $3 in early Asian trade after the overnight session was reported to be continuing. “Traders have learned not to price in peace until ink is dry,” said John Reilly, an oil and geopolitics analyst at Citi. “But the desk-level posture has shifted from ‘if’ to ‘when.’”

European foreign ministers were briefed Friday night by the Pakistani delegation via secure call, according to a diplomat in Brussels. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the bloc stood ready to fund humanitarian corridors and to underwrite an observer mission “the moment a text exists.” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, speaking to French radio Saturday morning, called the night’s progress “real but fragile.”

In Tehran, where rolling power cuts and fuel rationing have deepened public weariness with the war, state television carried unusually muted coverage of the strikes. A senior European intelligence official said the Iranian leadership appeared to be “preparing the domestic ground for a pause” — a shift from the defiant tone of recent weeks.

Pakistani officials cautioned that several scenarios could still derail an announcement, including a high-casualty incident on either side or a Houthi launch in the next 48 hours that the U.S. would treat as disqualifying. Mediators have built into the draft a “cooling clause” that would suspend the framework for 24 hours in the event of such an incident, rather than collapse it.

A formal joint statement could come as early as Sunday, according to two officials familiar with the schedule, though all three governments stressed that timing remained contingent on closing the verification annex. Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar was expected to convene a midday session Saturday with the heads of delegation.

“We will say what we have when we have it,” Anwar said. Mediators said further updates would be issued only when the text was ready to be read aloud.