Foreign ministers from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman and Qatar opened a second working session in Islamabad on Sunday, tasked with translating the four-day-old Iran-Israel ceasefire into a durable phase-two framework covering sanctions sequencing, naval coordination in the Persian Gulf and an expanded United Nations monitoring footprint inside Iraq and Yemen.

The convening, which began with a closed-door breakfast at the Foreign Office’s Margalla wing, was the first formal mediators’ meeting since the prisoner exchange concluded in Doha on Saturday. It was also the first since UN observers fanned out along the Strait of Hormuz earlier in the week and since Brent crude settled below $96 a barrel for the first time since the war began.

“The cessation of hostilities was the deliverable of phase one. The architecture that prevents a phase three is the deliverable of phase two,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar told reporters on the steps of the Foreign Office before the session began. He declined to be drawn on a timeline, saying only that the mediators were “operating with urgency, not haste.”

U.S. and Iranian envoys were present in Islamabad in observer capacity, as were representatives of the European External Action Service and a small Israeli technical delegation that arrived on a chartered flight from Larnaca on Saturday evening. The Israeli team, led by Foreign Ministry director-general Dani Carmon, was not scheduled to enter the main negotiating room but was lodged at a hotel within walking distance of the Foreign Office, three diplomats familiar with the logistics said.

Officials briefed on the agenda described a three-pillar working structure. The first pillar, chaired by Oman, covers sanctions sequencing: a phased relaxation of secondary sanctions on Iranian oil exports tied to verified suspensions of uranium enrichment above 5 percent and to continued Iranian cooperation with International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors at three sites struck during the war. The second pillar, led jointly by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, concerns a maritime coordination cell to deconflict naval traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Oman and the southern Red Sea. The third pillar, under Qatari chairmanship, addresses non-state actors — principally the Houthis in Yemen and Iran-aligned militias in Iraq — and the conditions under which their actions would or would not be treated as ceasefire violations.

“The hard questions are not between Tehran and Jerusalem at this point. The hard questions are about plumbing,” said Bilal Saab, a Washington-based analyst at the Middle East Institute. “Who picks up the phone when a Houthi launches a missile? Who decides whether a tanker can sail? Who certifies that an enrichment cascade has actually stopped spinning? The mediators are trying to write that org chart now, and the half-life of goodwill on something like this is measured in weeks.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, arriving from Doha late Saturday after attending the prisoner exchange, struck a notably less guarded tone than he had in previous Islamabad sessions. In brief remarks delivered in English at the airport, he said Iran was “prepared to discuss durable arrangements that respect the sovereignty and the dignity of all parties,” and confirmed that Tehran would extend, by an additional 30 days, the technical inspection protocol it agreed to last month with the IAEA. He declined to take questions.

Israeli officials, who have insisted throughout the talks that Israel will not be a formal signatory to any phase-two document but will instead operate through parallel American assurances, were said to be focused chiefly on the second and third pillars. Carmon’s delegation has pressed for a hard cap on Iranian transfers of precision-guidance components to Hezbollah and for an expanded Egyptian-Saudi maritime patrol mandate in the southern Red Sea, two officials briefed on Israeli positions said.

The U.S. envoy, Special Coordinator for Regional Affairs Brett McGurk, met separately on Saturday night with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan and with Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty. A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe private discussions, said the United States had pressed both mediators to ensure that any sanctions relief schedule remained “calibrated, conditional and reversible,” and to resist Iranian proposals to bundle the lifting of pre-war sanctions with the suspension of wartime measures.

The same official said Washington had received what he called “constructive” indications from Tehran that an Iranian gesture on Yemen — possibly a public call from Iran’s Supreme National Security Council for the Houthis to cease all Red Sea launches — was under active consideration. The Houthis, who are not parties to the Islamabad framework, fired a missile intercepted over the Bab el-Mandeb on Thursday, the first ceasefire-era incident, but have not launched since.

European participation, more visible than in previous rounds, reflected what one EU diplomat described as “a determination not to be presented with a finished document we had no hand in drafting.” High Representative Kaja Kallas, who was not present in Islamabad but spoke by video link during the opening plenary, urged the mediators to incorporate a sunset-and-review clause into any sanctions sequencing arrangement and offered EU technical assistance for monitoring.

The Gulf Cooperation Council, represented by its secretary-general Jasem Al-Budaiwi, separately announced that Bahrain had agreed to host a regional maritime security conference in early May to discuss the proposed coordination cell, suggesting that at least some elements of pillar two were already advancing in parallel to the main Islamabad track.

Inside the Foreign Office, the day’s discussions were expected to be procedural — agreeing on a sequencing of working groups, on a confidentiality regime for draft texts, and on a target date for a non-binding “principles document” that mediators would circulate before the end of the month. A senior Pakistani official said the goal was to produce that document by April 30 and a draft phase-two framework by mid-May, with formal signing, if achievable, deferred to a later session likely in Muscat.

Dar, asked on the steps whether he was optimistic, paused before answering. “I have learned in this job not to use that word,” he said. “But the room is more serious today than it was last week. That is something.” Mediators said a fuller readout would be issued after Sunday evening’s plenary, and that working group co-chairs would convene in Doha and Muscat over the coming days.