A wave of last-minute strikes and rocket fire rippled across the Middle East on Monday, testing the fragile ceasefire framework announced in Islamabad less than 48 hours earlier and stoking public anxiety in the final stretch before the truce is scheduled to take effect at midnight Wednesday GMT.

Israeli warplanes struck what the Israel Defense Forces described as a centrifuge-machining facility outside Yazd in central Iran shortly after dawn, the third such strike on Iran’s nuclear-adjacent industrial infrastructure in 72 hours. Hours later, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched what officials in Tehran called a “final corrective volley” of roughly 30 ballistic missiles and a swarm of one-way attack drones toward targets in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights. Israeli and U.S. air defenses intercepted the bulk of the salvo, the IDF said, though debris from a Shahed-class drone fell on a kibbutz near Beit She’an, wounding four civilians, one seriously.

In Yemen, Houthi forces fired a single anti-ship cruise missile at a U.S. Navy destroyer transiting the Bab el-Mandeb strait. The missile was destroyed in flight, U.S. Central Command said in a statement, and there were no casualties. Saudi air defenses intercepted two additional drones over the Empty Quarter overnight.

The flurry of violence on what was expected to be a quieting battlefield underscored how brittle the agreement remains. Negotiators emerged from a closed-door session in Islamabad on Saturday with a joint statement setting the halt for 00:00 GMT on April 15, but the document deferred a host of contested questions, including verification of Iran’s enrichment freeze and the future of Hezbollah’s remaining missile stocks in Lebanon.

“Every commander on every side wants to fire the last shot,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst at the Levant Institute. “That’s the most dangerous 60 hours of any ceasefire, and we are squarely inside that window.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, speaking to state television from Tehran, said Iran “remains committed to the timetable agreed in Islamabad” and described Monday’s missile launches as a “calibrated and proportionate response” to the Yazd strike rather than an attempt to derail the truce. He added that Iran reserved the right to act before the deadline against “any further aggression on sovereign Iranian soil.”

In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office issued a similarly worded statement, reaffirming Israel’s intent to honor the Wednesday deadline while warning that the IDF would “continue to act against immediate strategic threats” until then. A senior Israeli defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational planning, said the Yazd strike had been on the target list “for many weeks” and was executed now specifically because the closing window made delay impractical.

President Donald Trump, asked about the strikes at a brief White House gaggle before boarding Marine One, said the ceasefire was “going to hold, it’s going to hold beautifully,” and praised Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt for “doing a tremendous job” as mediators. The president declined to say whether the United States had been informed in advance of the Yazd operation. National Security Adviser Marco Rubio, in a separate appearance on a Sunday morning program rebroadcast Monday, said Washington was “in constant contact” with both capitals and was “very confident” the truce would take effect on schedule.

Markets reacted with cautious unease rather than panic. Brent crude rose $2.40 to settle near $103 a barrel in late London trading, retracing a portion of last week’s post-OPEC slide but well below the $125 peak reached in late March. The S&P 500 closed down 0.6 percent, with defense contractors among the few gainers. “The tape is telling you the market still believes Wednesday holds,” said John Reilly, a cross-asset strategist at Citi. “If we got into Tuesday night with another major exchange, you’d see a very different print.”

In Islamabad, Pakistani Foreign Secretary Asad Majeed Khan convened the mediators’ working group for an unscheduled session Monday afternoon, joined by Saudi and Egyptian envoys and by a senior U.S. State Department official, a senior Pakistani diplomat said. The group issued a brief joint communique calling on “all parties to exercise maximum restraint in the final hours” and confirming that liaison officers from both Iran and Israel would deploy to a Pakistani-hosted deconfliction cell ahead of the deadline.

Civilians across the region braced through another tense night. In Tel Aviv, shelters in residential buildings filled within minutes of Monday evening’s siren alerts, and Ben Gurion Airport extended a partial closure that has stranded thousands of travelers since late March. In Tehran, residents reported long queues at gas stations and grocery stores, and state media broadcast civil-defense instructions on a continuous loop. Lebanese Health Ministry officials in Beirut said hospitals in the south remained on emergency footing.

U.S. forces in the region remained at heightened alert. The Pentagon said the death of a Marine corporal killed by drone fragments at Al-Asad Air Base in western Iraq on Sunday night brought the total U.S. service-member toll since the conflict began to 352. The Pentagon identified the Marine as Cpl. Ethan Vasquez, 22, of Bakersfield, California. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a statement Monday morning, said American forces would “maintain full defensive posture through the moment the ceasefire takes effect, and beyond.”

Analysts cautioned that even a clean transition to the truce on Wednesday would leave a tangle of unresolved issues — sanctions relief, prisoner exchanges, the fate of Iranian-aligned militias in Iraq and Syria, and the politically charged question of an international monitoring presence at Iran’s surviving enrichment sites. A draft prisoner-exchange list circulating among the mediators reportedly includes roughly 40 detained foreign nationals on the Iranian side, alongside the remains of several U.S. service members, in return for Iranian and Hezbollah-affiliated detainees held by the United States and Israel.

For now, officials on all sides said, the priority is simply getting to Wednesday. “The hardest part of any ceasefire is the day before it begins,” said retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Marcus Holloway, a former CENTCOM deputy commander now at the Atlantic Council. “Everyone is watching the clock, and no one wants to blink first.” Mediators in Islamabad said additional confidence-building measures would be announced Tuesday.