Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his security cabinet Thursday that his government would engage “conditionally and through Washington” with the framework principles circulated by Pakistani, Saudi and Egyptian mediators in Islamabad, ending an awkward four-day silence from Jerusalem and clearing a procedural hurdle that had threatened to stall the mediation just as it gathered momentum.

The Israeli posture, announced after a six-hour meeting at the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv, falls well short of an endorsement. Officials briefed on the deliberations said Netanyahu rejected any suggestion that Israel would join the proximity format in Islamabad, but agreed for the first time to allow a senior representative to sit inside the U.S.-led liaison cell in Riyadh and to provide written reactions to the mediators’ draft within seventy-two hours.

“The government of Israel will not negotiate with the regime in Tehran, but it will not stand in the way of a diplomatic test that the President of the United States has asked us to allow,” Netanyahu said in a brief statement read to reporters by his spokesman, Eylon Levy, outside the Kirya. “Our conditions are unchanged. Our patience is finite.”

For the Trump administration, the announcement followed three days of intense pressure, including a long telephone call between President Donald Trump and Netanyahu late Wednesday and a visit to Jerusalem by Deputy Secretary of State Caroline Whitman, who flew in from Islamabad after the mediators’ second day of sessions. A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Whitman had carried a one-page American “non-paper” interpreting the Islamabad text in terms designed to address Israel’s principal objections.

“The Israelis have not signed anything, and we are not asking them to,” the official said. “What we have is the political space to keep the Pakistanis and the Saudis at the table for another week.”

The contested clauses

Israeli officials laid out three conditions that they said would govern engagement. The first, described as non-negotiable, requires that any sequenced pause preserve Israel’s right to strike “imminent and identified” nuclear or missile-production threats, a carve-out broader than the one currently bracketed in the mediators’ draft. The second demands that the Houthi leadership in Sanaa be bound by the same stand-down language as Iran, and that violations from Yemen be treated as Iranian violations. The third insists that any monitoring cell be co-staffed by an Israeli liaison officer, even if that officer reports through American channels.

The mediators reacted cautiously. Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, briefing reporters at the Foreign Office in Islamabad late Thursday, said the Israeli conditions were “a contribution to the conversation, not a precondition to it,” and that the trilateral team would integrate the points into a revised non-paper to be circulated Friday evening. “They have, for the first time, written down what they want,” Dar said.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, asked whether Riyadh would accept Israeli demands on the Houthis, declined to be drawn on specifics, saying only that “every party to this war has a vote on every clause that touches it.”

Iran’s reaction was sharper. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, speaking in Tehran after a meeting with President Masoud Pezeshkian, called the Israeli carve-out on nuclear strikes “a license to break the very pause we are being asked to agree to,” and said Iran would reject any text that allowed for unilateral Israeli action during a stand-down. He stopped short, however, of saying that Iran would walk away. “We continue to talk,” Araghchi told reporters. “We will not be the side that ends this.”

A narrower window

Diplomats said the practical effect of Thursday’s developments was to compress the timetable rather than expand it. Mediators had previously envisioned a phased process running through late April. With Israeli engagement now formally on the table, three officials said, the Saudi and Egyptian governments were pushing for the first synchronized “sequenced quiet” to begin as soon as April 15, contingent on a written exchange of reservations from all parties by the weekend.

“This is the hardest week of the talks, not the easiest,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst with the Levant Policy Forum. “Until now, the mediators have been writing language that everyone could live with because no one had committed to anything. The moment Israel writes down its conditions, the trade-offs become real, and the diplomats have to choose what to lose.”

A senior Pakistani official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the trilateral team had quietly added a fourth mediator to Friday’s sessions: Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr al-Busaidi, whose government has hosted American-Iranian back-channels for more than a decade and would chair the monitoring cell envisioned in the draft.

Strikes and casualties

The diplomacy unfolded against an unbroken backdrop of violence. Israeli aircraft struck what the IDF called a missile-storage complex near Khorramabad in western Iran early Thursday, the second such strike on the facility in ten days. Iranian state television reported four dead and described the target as a civilian warehouse; the IDF disputed that account. Iran fired two ballistic missiles toward Israel late Wednesday night, both intercepted, and Houthi forces in Yemen launched a drone swarm against a Saudi-operated oil terminal at Yanbu, where Saudi air defenses destroyed all but one of the projectiles.

The Pentagon, in its daily war update, reported the cumulative U.S. casualty figure from the broader conflict had risen to 368, an increase of five from Tuesday.

Markets again read the diplomatic signals before they read the strike reports. Brent crude fell another $1.80 in London trading to settle near $103, its lowest close since the war began, and the S&P 500 closed up 1.1 percent as traders priced in a higher probability of a near-term ceasefire. “The Israeli statement was the gate everyone had been waiting on,” said John Reilly, a commodities analyst at Citi. “It does not get us to a deal, but it tells the market the deal is now possible.”

Pakistani officials said the revised non-paper would be circulated Friday evening and that a third joint communiqué from the mediators was expected by Sunday. Dar said additional steps, including a possible expansion of the Riyadh liaison cell and the formal designation of Muscat as the monitoring hub, would be announced as the parties responded.