Oman accepted a formal role Thursday in the Islamabad mediation track, agreeing to host and chair a multinational monitoring cell that diplomats said could underwrite a conditional halt to the Iran war within ten days, the most operational step yet in the diplomatic effort to end six weeks of fighting.

In a brief statement read by Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi from the Diwan in Muscat, the Sultanate said it had accepted “a coordinating responsibility, not a mediating one,” and that Omani officers would chair what is now being referred to in the talks as the Strait of Hormuz Verification Cell. Albusaidi said the cell would operate from a Royal Air Force of Oman facility outside Seeb International Airport and would be staffed by liaison officers from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, and the United Nations, with separate desks for Iranian, U.S., and Israeli interlocutors.

The announcement came as Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar opened a fourth consecutive day of proximity talks in Islamabad. Dar told reporters that Oman’s acceptance had been the missing operational piece in the framework principles circulated to the parties on Sunday, because no party trusted any other to verify a synchronized stand-down on its own. “The Sultanate has the standing to chair this room,” Dar said. “It has spoken to all of them, and none of them have asked it to leave.”

The Muscat cell, as it is being called by participants, was first proposed in the bracketed text of the framework’s “sequenced quiet” section, which envisions a 96-hour synchronized pause in Iranian ballistic and drone launches, U.S. and Israeli offensive strikes inside Iran, and Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. The pause is meant to function as a test bed for a longer ceasefire and would, under the current draft, be assessed by the cell on a rolling six-hour basis.

Three officials briefed on the drafting said the cell’s standing-up over the next 72 hours would be the most concrete measure by which the seriousness of the Islamabad process could be judged. “Until now we have had paragraphs,” said one Arab diplomat. “Beginning today we will have an address, a phone number, and a chain of command.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, in a written statement issued from Tehran, welcomed the Omani role and said it reflected what he called “the only neutrality in the Gulf that has not been purchased.” He renewed Iran’s insistence that any pause be matched by a corresponding Israeli suspension of strikes against nuclear-related facilities and reiterated Tehran’s demand that the unfreezing of certain financial channels at Iranian banks in Asia be included in any text. Araghchi did not address the question of Houthi launches directly, a continuing sticking point that mediators said was now being managed in a separate sub-track in Doha.

The U.S. delegation in Islamabad, led by Deputy Secretary of State Caroline Whitman, declined to comment on the Omani announcement beyond a written statement saying Washington “took note” and remained “in continuous coordination with our partners.” A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe the U.S. posture, said the administration considered the Muscat cell “an architecture we can live with” so long as the chain of communication preserved an American veto over verification findings that pertained to Israeli operations. “The president is not going to outsource judgments about Israeli security to a room in Seeb,” the official said.

Israel, which has not appeared at the Islamabad table and is communicating through a small American-led liaison cell in Riyadh, issued no public reaction. Two Israeli officials, speaking on background, said the Prime Minister’s office had received a detailed briefing on the Omani role from the Trump administration on Wednesday night and had asked for further clarification of the cell’s mandate before commenting. One of the officials added that Jerusalem’s concerns centered less on Oman’s role than on whether the cell’s findings could be used to constrain future Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites once the 96-hour test period concluded.

The Omani role draws on a long-running back channel between Muscat and Tehran that dates to the 2013 nuclear talks and, before that, to quiet contacts during the Iran-Iraq war. Sultan Haitham bin Tariq personally called both President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian over the weekend to gauge support for the cell, according to two officials familiar with the calls. The same officials said Sultan Haitham had insisted, as a condition, that the cell be described publicly as a “coordinating” rather than “mediating” body, to avoid any appearance that Oman was substituting itself for the Islamabad mediators.

“Muscat has always preferred to be useful in ways that do not require it to be loud,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst with the Levant Policy Forum. “What is striking here is that this time, by being useful, it is being asked to be loud as well. That is a different posture for them, and it carries different risks.”

Pakistani officials disclosed that the draft framework had been revised overnight to incorporate the Omani role and that a fresh working paper, marked “Working Paper III,” had been handed to the Iranian and U.S. delegations at the morning session. Diplomats said the new draft reduced the number of bracketed clauses from eleven to seven, with the remaining brackets covering the duration of any extended ceasefire, the scope of language on Hezbollah, the IAEA’s role in verifying Iranian nuclear sites, and the question of when financial channels at Iranian banks in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur could be unfrozen.

Strikes continued in both directions through the day. The Israel Defense Forces said its aircraft had targeted a missile-component facility in Iran’s Khorasan province overnight, while Iranian state media reported the destruction of a residential block in Isfahan. U.S. Central Command said two short-range rockets had been fired toward al-Asad Air Base in Iraq’s Anbar province; both fell short, and no casualties were reported. Houthi forces did not claim any launches against Red Sea shipping for a second consecutive day, the longest such pause since mid-March.

Markets read the Omani step as a modest positive. Brent crude eased $1.40 to settle at $103.20 a barrel in London trading, its lowest close since OPEC+ announced its 1.5 million-barrel production hike in Vienna last week. “The market is now treating a ceasefire as more likely than not by month’s end,” said John Reilly, a commodities analyst at Citi. “That is a significant repricing from where the curve was sitting on April first.”

Pakistani officials said a fifth day of sessions was scheduled for Friday, with the first liaison officers expected to arrive in Muscat over the weekend. Dar said the mediators expected a formal Iranian response to Working Paper III by Saturday and a corresponding U.S. response, after consultations with Israel, by early next week. Additional steps, including the possible designation of a UN observer to the Muscat cell, would be announced as the parties responded.