Foreign ministries on three continents responded within hours Sunday to the joint Islamabad statement halting the six-week war between Iran and Israel, with most welcoming the agreement but appending pointed conditions on verification, the role of Yemen’s Houthis and the question of what happens to existing sanctions after fighting stops at midnight GMT on April 15.

The European Union led the official chorus. The High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Kaja Kallas, said in a statement issued from Brussels that the bloc “welcomes without reservation the cessation of hostilities” and would dispatch a small civilian observer team to Vienna by Tuesday to support the verification annex. Kallas added a sentence diplomats parsed carefully: that the EU expected “all parties, including non-state armed groups, to comply in full from the first hour.” French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz issued a joint readout from a Sunday-afternoon phone call calling the agreement “an opening, not yet an outcome,” and pledging to convene a foreign-ministers’ meeting in Paris on Wednesday.

In Beijing, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told a hastily-arranged briefing that the People’s Republic “appreciates the mediation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and our Saudi and Egyptian partners” and called for the lifting of “unilateral coercive measures” once the truce held — a reference, analysts said, to the U.S. and EU sanctions architecture that has tightened since the war began. Russia’s foreign ministry, in a longer statement read by spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, took a similar line, welcoming the ceasefire while insisting that “the parties that fueled this conflict, including by extraregional military presence, must now show restraint in the post-war phase.”

The Gulf reaction was the most explicitly relieved. Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry, in a statement attributed to Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, called the agreement “a victory for regional diplomacy and for every household that has lived under the threat of falling missiles for forty-three days.” The United Arab Emirates’ Anwar Gargash, the diplomatic adviser to the presidency, wrote on the platform X that the moment “vindicates the patient work of mediators and the courage of the leaders who signed.” Qatar, which is expected to host the prisoner exchange around April 18, said its emir had spoken Sunday morning with the Pakistani prime minister and the Iranian foreign minister.

Yet even as capitals issued formal welcomes, diplomats were already focused on the parts of the framework that had been left ambiguous. The joint statement, released at 03:14 local time in Islamabad, names Oman and Switzerland as verification monitors and references a 72-hour halt cycle but does not specify which signatory carries responsibility for ensuring Houthi compliance in Yemen. A senior European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because the conversations are confidential, said the omission was “the obvious load-bearing question” and that Wednesday’s Paris meeting would test whether the Gulf states were willing to underwrite Houthi behavior or whether that role would fall to a UN-led mechanism.

“There is a version of this ceasefire that holds for thirty days and quietly unravels in the Red Sea,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, in a telephone interview. “Insurance markets are not going to come back to those lanes on a Pakistani guarantee. They are going to come back on a verification regime that has teeth, and we do not yet know who is supplying the teeth.”

The Trump administration’s response was measured. President Donald Trump, in remarks to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before departing for Mar-a-Lago, called the agreement “tremendous” and “the kind of deal that ends wars,” and credited his own administration’s “maximum pressure that brought them to the table.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a more formal statement, thanked the Pakistani, Saudi, Egyptian and Omani governments and said the United States would “stand behind every commitment we have made and expect the same of others.” The statement made no explicit reference to sanctions relief, and a senior State Department official, briefing reporters on background Sunday afternoon, said the administration’s view was that “sanctions architecture is not on the ceasefire table; that is a separate conversation for a separate phase.”

Tehran’s allies sounded less restrained than Tehran itself. The office of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, whose country has hosted U.S. forces targeted repeatedly during the war, issued a statement of “deep relief” and said Iraq would press for the withdrawal of foreign troops “as the post-conflict architecture comes into focus.” In Beirut, a statement attributed to Hezbollah’s political bureau noted “the resilience of the resistance axis” but stopped short of endorsing or rejecting the framework. Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst at the Carnegie Middle East Center, said the silence on substance was itself revealing. “Hezbollah is being told to absorb this and not break it,” Hassan said. “That is a meaningful instruction.”

Latin American and African responses came in waves through the afternoon. Brazil’s foreign minister Mauro Vieira, on behalf of the BRICS rotating presidency, called for “a rapid transition from cessation of hostilities to humanitarian reconstruction.” The African Union, in a statement from its commission chairperson, urged “the protection of civilians and migrant workers throughout the Gulf region during the verification window.” Turkey’s foreign ministry, sensitive to the optics of having been outside the mediation, said it stood “ready to contribute to any verification or reconstruction mechanism.”

By Sunday evening, the United Nations Security Council had scheduled an emergency session for Monday morning in New York to discuss a resolution endorsing the framework and authorizing the observer presence at the Strait of Hormuz. Diplomats said the U.S. and European drafts under negotiation differed primarily on the question of how the resolution should characterize the residual sanctions regime, with Russia and China expected to push amendments.

The Pakistani host delegation, in a brief evening readout, said negotiators would remain in Islamabad through Tuesday to finalize the verification annex. Officials said additional steps, including the precise sequencing of the prisoner exchange and the deployment of monitors, would be announced before the truce takes effect at 00:00 GMT on April 15.