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- Iran War Live Updates: Vance Lands in Pakistan for Peace Talks With Iran — nyt News
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Iran War Live Updates: Vance Lands in Pakistan for Peace Talks With Iran
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/11/2026, 4:04:43 PM
Beirut1:39 p.m. April 11
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Elian PeltierTyler PagerJohn Yoon and Aaron Boxerman
Elian Peltier and Tyler Pager reported from Islamabad, Pakistan.
Vice President JD Vance arrived in Pakistan on Saturday for peace negotiations with Iranian officials, as disagreements over the Israeli assault in Lebanon and Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz rattled the fragile cease-fire.
Mr. Vance later met with top officials from Pakistan, which brokered the two-week truce to suspend fighting between Israel, the United States and Iran. Much was still unclear about the talks, including whether the negotiations would be conducted face-to-face or solely via mediators.
The stakes are high: The five-week war brought chaos across the Middle East, and the temporary truce remains brittle. In a Friday address, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan called it a “make or break” moment.
Israel and the United States attacked Iran in late February, killing many of Iran’s top leaders and calling for the ouster of its government. Iranian retaliatory attacks have since drawn in much of the Middle East and battered the world economy. Iran also began blockading the Strait of Hormuz, sending global energy prices skyrocketing.
The full reopening of the Persian Gulf waterway, a vital passage for oil and gas, will be among the priorities for Mr. Vance during the negotiations. Iran’s military signaled in a statement on Friday that it would maintain control of the strait.
Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon against Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group, has also threatened to derail the truce. Iran had accused Israel of breaking the cease-fire by continuing to attack in Lebanon, leading Mr. Trump to ask Israel to rein in its assault.
Israeli fighter jets have not attacked the Lebanese capital of Beirut since Wednesday. But Israel has kept up its airstrikes in southern Lebanon, including on Saturday morning, according to Lebanon’s state media.
Both the United States and Iran have claimed that the other side was desperate to make a deal. Hours before the Iranians arrived in Pakistan, Mr. Ghalibaf, one of the key figures overseeing the war, cast doubt that the talks would even take place, demanding a cease-fire in Lebanon and the release of unspecified Iranian “blocked assets.”
Mr. Trump suggested on social media that Iran was overplaying its hand. “The Iranians don’t seem to realize they have no cards, other than a short term extortion of the World by using International Waterways,” he wrote, referring to Iran’s continued control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
Negotiating team: Mr. Vance was joined in Islamabad by President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The Iranian delegation, which includes Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, arrived earlier in the Pakistani capital. Read more about them here.
Strait of Hormuz: Only two ships passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Friday. U.S. officials said one reason Iran had been unable to get more ships through was that it could not locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacked the capability to remove them.
Israel and Lebanon: The countries’ ambassadors to the United States are expected to meet in Washington next week for direct talks, but a settlement to end the war in Lebanon is not expected imminently. More than a million people — roughly a fifth of the population — have been forced from their homes since the renewed war erupted last month between Israel and Hezbollah. Take a closer look in photos and video here.
Death tolls: The Human Rights Activists News Agency said at least 1,701 civilians, including 254 children, had been killed in Iran as of Wednesday. Lebanon’s health ministry on Friday said that at least 1,953 people had been killed in the latest fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, including 357 in a wave of Israeli strikes on Wednesday. In attacks attributed to Iran, at least 32 people have been killed in Gulf nations. In Israel, at least 20 people had been killed as of Monday. The American death toll stands at 13 service members.
Vice President JD Vance held a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan on Saturday, the White House said. The U.S. delegation also includes Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. The Pakistani delegation included Mohsin Naqvi, the interior minister, and Ishaq Dar, the foreign minister.
Dozens of reporters gathered in Islamabad to cover the U.S.-Iranian negotiations are mostly in the dark about the talks, despite being within walking distance of the hotel where they are expected to occur. “No one knows when, where, or how these talks are taking place,” Nadir Guramani, a Pakistani journalist, said at the Jinnah Convention Center, a sprawling government complex where the press was gathered. “We do not even know what is happening outside, as movement across the city is restricted,” he added.
But even after his arrival in Islamabad, the timing of any talks remained unclear. Iranian officials threatened at various points to refuse direct meetings if the United States did not accede to various demands, including unfreezing Iran’s overseas assets and expanding the cease-fire to include Lebanon.
The White House did not share any schedule, with officials emphasizing the sensitivity and fluidity of the negotiations. It was unclear how many meetings the U.S. delegation — which included Steve Witkoff, President Trump's special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law — would hold while in Pakistan. They were not even sure how long they would stay in the country.
By Saturday afternoon, the American delegation had held one meeting with foreign counterparts: a bilateral engagement with Pakistan. Mr. Vance, Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner met with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan and other Pakistani officials. The White House did not provide a statement about the meeting.
The talks are being held amid a fragile cease-fire that Pakistan negotiated hours before a Tuesday deadline set by Mr. Trump. The president had threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization if the country did not agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The in-person talks were announced the day after the cease-fire deal, even amid disagreements about what the cease-fire included and whether each side was holding up its end of the arrangement.
Mr. Vance, meanwhile, finds himself leading an American delegation to negotiate a lasting peace for a war he adamantly opposed starting. He repeatedly raised concerns before the conflict, telling colleagues that regime-change war would be a disaster.
And yet on Saturday morning, Mr. Vance arrived in Islamabad, greeted by a delegation of Pakistani leaders and given a bouquet of flowers by a young boy. He made a brief stop at the U.S. Embassy before continuing on to the Serena Hotel, the five-star hotel that was emptied out earlier in the week to accommodate the delegations.
Throughout Islamabad, Pakistani officials have affixed signs on lampposts and billboards with the American, Pakistani and Iranian flags to advertise the negotiations, which they have dubbed the “Islamabad Talks.”
When the United States and Iran agreed to a cease-fire this week, many Iranians welcomed the reprieve from a devastating war that had stretched for over five weeks. But some hard-line supporters of the government were left deeply unhappy.
At a march held on Thursday in Tehran to commemorate the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who was killed at the outset of the U.S.-Israeli campaign, some demonstrators held signs that read: “Cease-fire is prohibited. It’s time for revenge” and “No compromise, no surrender. Fight until victory.”
The hard-liners’ distaste for negotiations with the United States is adding to the pressure on Iranian officials as they engage with their American counterparts on Saturday in Pakistan to discuss terms for an end to the war.
Conservative Iranians opposed to the cease-fire argue that the United States and its ally Israel have proven that they cannot be trusted. They point to the last two rounds of negotiations between Iran and the United States, which were interrupted by military attacks on Iran.
They are furious that Israel has continued to strike Lebanon in the days after the cease-fire was agreed. And they believe that Iran was winning the war, and now risks squandering that advantage.
“What happened was #diplomatic_sabotage in the midst of battlefield success,” wrote Seyed Ehsan Hosseini, an energy journalist who previously worked at a news outlet affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, in an X post on the second day of the cease-fire. “Abandon Lebanon, and God will abandon us.”
After President Trump wrote on social media that Iran could not enrich uranium, something it has claimed as an inherent right, Ebrahim Rezaei, a member of Iran’s parliament and spokesman for the legislature’s national security and foreign policy committee, called for Iranian officials to “cancel negotiations with the defeated devil so they know that we are not in a position of weakness.”
Hard-liners within Iran generally have more freedom to harshly criticize the government, especially the conduct and policy decisions of elected figures who come from more moderate camps.
Some of those conservative figures have been upset for years over what they see as inadequate deterrence against attacks by the United States and Israel, believing this has emboldened Iran’s enemies to act more aggressively against the country.
Much of the Iranian population is opposed to the current government, and the country has seen round after round of nationwide protests demanding an end to the Islamic republic.
Given that limited popular support, ensuring the backing of its base is especially important for the government.
If this round of negotiations were to again be cut short by strikes on Iran, or if Iranian officials were seen to be conceding too much, the support of those hard-liners could be at risk.
Iran’s delegation has met with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan, Iranian state television reported in a short update on Saturday. Pakistan is mediating talks between the United States and Iran.
In the coastal city of Sidon, Lebanon, mourners paid tribute to 13 state security personnel who were killed the previous day by an Israeli strike in the southern city of Nabatieh. Israel says it is striking Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia backed by Iran. But the attacks have threatened to derail the U.S.-Iranian cease-fire, and several countries have called for Lebanon to be included in the truce.
State media in Lebanon reported renewed gunfire and Israeli military activity in the country’s south on Saturday. The National News Agency said an Israeli attack helicopter fired toward the town of Taybeh. Continued Israeli strikes against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group, have raised concerns about the stability of the cease-fire, as international calls grow to extend the truce to Lebanon.
Vice President JD Vance has arrived at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad for planned talks with Pakistani and Iranian officials. The White House has not released a schedule.
The U.S. and Iranian delegations are now both in Islamabad for what Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan has described as “a make or break moment.” Pakistan’s army chief and foreign minister welcomed Vice President JD Vance to the country on Saturday. After Vance’s arrival, Ishaq Dar, the foreign minister, “expressed the hope that parties would engage constructively” in the talks, which are expected to start a few hours from now. First, both delegations are scheduled to meet with Sharif.
Throughout Islamabad, Pakistani officials have put up signs advertising the negotiations. The signs say “Islamabad Talks April 2026” with the flags of Pakistan, the United States and Iran.
Vice President JD Vance has arrived in Islamabad for talks with Iran. He landed around 10:30 a.m. local time and was greeted by Pakistani officials at the Nur Khan air force base. He received a bouquet of flowers from a young boy before walking down a red carpet surrounded by an honor guard. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who arrived in Pakistan separately, met him at the end of the red carpet.
The U.S.-Iran talks in Islamabad are scheduled to take place at the five-star Serena Hotel, according to Pakistani officials who were not authorized to speak publicly because of the sensitivity around the event. The hotel was emptied earlier this week to host the delegations. We are reporting from a convention center across the road that has been arranged for the dozens of journalists covering the talks, but we have not been granted access to the Serena.
Farnaz Fassihi has covered Iran for three decades, living and traveling throughout the country. She was a war correspondent based in the Middle East for 15 years.
An Iranian team led by the veteran politician and military commander Gen. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf are scheduled to negotiate with an American delegation headed by Vice President JD Vance on Saturday in Islamabad, Pakistan, to discuss a possible end to the war.
The stakes are high for both sides. The war is deeply unpopular in the United States and President Trump is looking for an exit ramp. Iran has been pummeled with airstrikes, leaving its infrastructure severely destroyed and its economy in ruins.
“We have good will, but we do not have trust,” Mr. Ghalibaf, who is the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, said upon arriving in Islamabad on Friday evening. He pointed out that two earlier rounds of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, in June and February, ended with military strikes instead of a deal.
Iran appears to be taking the talks on Saturday seriously. The delegation of at least 70 people includes experienced diplomats and negotiators, experts in finance and sanctions, military officials and legal advisers, according to Iranian media and a list of the delegation seen by The New York Times.
Notable officials in the Iranian camp include Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi; Ali Bagheri Kani, a member of Iran’s National Security Council; Admiral Ali Akbar Ahmadian, a former chief of staff for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and secretary of the National Security Council; Gen. Esmail Ahmadi Moghadam, a retired military commander who is now the head of Iran’s National Defense University; and Abdolnasser Hemati, governor of the Central Bank of Iran.
Three senior Iranian officials familiar with the talks said Iran’s team had full authority to make decisions in Pakistan and was not required to consult with Tehran given the critical nature of the negotiations. The officials, who asked not to be named because they were discussing sensitive issues, said the new supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei had given Mr. Ghalibaf, who is a close friend and ally, the power to make a deal or walk away.
Iran’s vice president, Mohammad Reza Aref, said in a social media post on Friday that Mr. Ghalibaf was now “representing the nation and the nezam,” using the Persian word for the Islamic Republic’s entire system, which includes not only the elected government but also the supreme leader. “I wish him success,” Mr. Aref said.
“What we can read from Iran’s delegation is that they have not come to stonewall,” said Vali Nasr, a professor of Middle Eastern studies and an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University. “They have come with full authority and seriousness to reach a deal with the United States.”
Mr. Nasr, who also served in the State Department as a special U.S. representative to Afghanistan during the Obama administration, said that typically such a large delegation of experts would only be deployed if negotiations were in the final stages of a deal, not for an initial testing of the waters.
If Mr. Ghalibaf and Mr. Vance meet in person on Saturday it will represent a major turn in relations between the United States and Iran and the highest-level meeting of officials since diplomatic relations ruptured in 1979. Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, will accompany Mr. Vance and both have negotiated with the Iranians before.
Mr. Nasr said that Tehran and Washington might have advanced in talks further than publicly known during back-channel messaging mediated by Pakistan over the past week. Washington sent Tehran a 15-point peace plan and Iran replied with its own 10-point counter plan, which Mr. Trump said would be the framework for talks when he announced the cease-fire on Tuesday.
Among the issues on the table are ending the war, opening the Strait of Hormuz to ships and Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s interests include securing comprehensive sanctions relief, the release of frozen funds and compensation for damage during the war.
Iran has said that any peace deal, temporary or permanent, must also include its closest regional ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. This has been an especially fraught point of contention since massive Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon killed more than 300 people on Wednesday.
Iranian officials, true to form, traveled with symbolism. They arrived wearing head-to-toe black suits and shirts, a sign of mourning. On their plane, according to photographs and videos on Iranian state media, photos and backpacks filled empty seats to represent the nearly 170 children killed in an elementary school when an American tomahawk missile struck it.
Iranian state media said the delegation would meet with Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, at noon on Saturday ahead of meeting with the Americans.
Omid Memarian, a senior fellow and Iran expert at Dawn Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit focused on American foreign policy, said the large delegation was meant to signal that Iran’s top leaders were backing it.
“The most important message Iran is sending with the composition of its delegation,” he said, “is that there is internal consensus for negotiations and a deal at the highest levels of the regime.”
Shirin Hakim contributed reporting.
Reporting from Washington
Even as Air Force Two carried Vice President JD Vance toward Pakistan for weekend talks with Iran, President Trump’s shaky cease-fire with Tehran was in growing jeopardy as world leaders hastened efforts to prevent a return to all-out war.
For a third day, work to prop up the cease-fire, which was announced on Tuesday, focused on Israel’s attacks on Lebanon. Iran says the continued assault violates its deal with Mr. Trump to stop U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran in exchange for safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has resisted international pressure to halt his country’s related campaign against Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon.
Iran had threatened to call off its meeting with Mr. Vance at a luxury hotel in Islamabad, set for Saturday morning local time. The arrival of an Iranian delegation in Islamabad on Friday, even after Mr. Netanyahu vowed to continue his Lebanon offensive, suggested that the talks would commence as planned.
With the future of the world economy at stake, several foreign nations worked to keep diplomacy between Washington and Tehran on track. On Friday, the World Bank’s president, Ajay Banga, told Reuters that a return to war and further Iranian disruption of commercial shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz could significantly slow global economic growth and exacerbate inflation.
Mindful of such bleak scenarios, top officials from across Europe and Asia joined countless calls and meetings on the subject with their counterparts. France’s president pressured Israel to halt its attacks in Lebanon. Britain’s prime minister finished a three-day visit to Gulf Arab capitals to discuss the strait’s reopening. Saudi Arabian officials urged China to continue its pressure on Iran to remain engaged in diplomacy.
In a Friday address to his nation, Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said the planned U.S. meeting with Iran was a “make or break” moment. And Mr. Sharif — until now not known as a kingpin of international diplomacy — said on social media that he had fielded calls from a slew of world leaders, including from Qatar, Germany, Australia and Britain.
Even if the dispute over Lebanon does not derail the Islamabad talks, said Vali R. Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, it will have further poisoned the atmosphere for discussions between the two sides after five weeks of warfare and decades of distrust.
That will make bridging the wide divide between Washington and Tehran on Iran’s nuclear program, the Strait of Hormuz and other matters even more difficult. Veteran diplomats were already doubtful that a larger agreement was possible without at least extending the two-week clock established by Tuesday’s cease-fire.
“Lebanon has changed the context of the talks,” Mr. Nasr said. Iran has stressed its view that the cease-fire was supposed to apply to Lebanon. Although Mr. Vance on Wednesday claimed there had been a “misunderstanding” over the status of Lebanon, Mr. Sharif’s announcement of the deal — which was edited in advance by the Trump White House — called for an end to the fighting there.
“If you’re already thinking that this guy, Mr. Trump, may cheat you, that doesn’t augur well,” Mr. Nasr said.
Tehran has other reasons to distrust Mr. Trump and his emissaries, he noted. During his first term as president, Mr. Trump abandoned a 2015 nuclear deal that Iran had painstakingly negotiated with the Obama administration over roughly 20 months. And twice in the past year, Mr. Trump has begun talks with Tehran only to launch devastating attacks without warning.
Mr. Vance will be joined in Islamabad by Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who participated in the previous rounds of nuclear talks with Iran — and who came away insisting the Iranians were the deceitful party. The three Americans plan to negotiate with Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, and the Iranian parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
It is unclear whether the two sides will meet in person or pass messages through Pakistani intermediaries. Diplomats say that direct meetings are far more efficient and less prone to miscommunication, but can also bring political risk by appearing conciliatory.
The talks are to be held at Islamabad’s five-star Serena Hotel, whose guests were abruptly instructed this week to check out because Pakistan’s government had “requisitioned our hotel for an important event,” according to Russia’s TASS news service.
The talks may be shaped by outside powers invested in their success. Among them is China, whose economy depends heavily on gas and oil shipped from Gulf Arab nations through the Strait of Hormuz.
“Any escalation or expansion of the conflict would run counter to China’s interests in stable and functioning global energy markets,” said Ryan Hass, a former career diplomat and White House national security official who directs the China center at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Hass said that would support reports that Beijing urged Tehran to accept the cease-fire, including Mr. Sharif’s message of public thanks to several nations, including China, after the deal was concluded.
A Saudi official said that Riyadh has encouraged China to remain involved as the diplomacy proceeds.
Liu Pengyu, the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said in a statement that China has been working since the conflict began “to help bring about a cease-fire and end to the conflict.”
Experts said the cease-fire has held despite serious flaws because both sides are eager for some kind of deal. Iran has been under crushing military and economic pressure but has considerable leverage in its demonstrated ability to close the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Trump has endured rising gas prices, tepid support for the war and dissent from within his political base.
But few actors foresaw Lebanon as posing so much danger to peace efforts.
Mr. Trump has never expressed much interest in the country, which is smaller than Connecticut, with a battered economy and few natural resources.
But Lebanon is of critical importance to Mr. Netanyahu as the home base of Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group formed with Iran’s backing after Israel’s 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon. Israel has long traded cross-border fire and occasionally gone to war with Hezbollah.
But after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks highlighted the threat Israel faces from armed militias on its borders, Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to see the group — which regularly launches rocket attacks into Israel from southern Lebanon — disarmed under a long-stalled United Nations mandate or destroyed.
After a call on Wednesday from Mr. Trump asking him to scale back attacks in Lebanon, Mr. Netanyahu announced that Israel would join talks with Lebanon’s government to discuss Hezbollah’s disarmament. The State Department then announced that it would host the parties for a meeting in Washington next week.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump sounded reassured, saying that Mr. Netanyahu would be “scaling back” operations in Lebanon.
But there has been little evidence of that, and Mr. Netanyahu seemed to double down in a public statement, saying he had not agreed to a cease-fire in Lebanon and vowing he would continue “to strike Hezbollah with full force.”
Fearing for the survival of the Iran talks, other world leaders have sought to pressure Mr. Netanyahu. On Wednesday, President Emmanuel Macron of France condemned what he called Israel’s “indiscriminate strikes” in Lebanon that day.
Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, said in a statement on Friday that he had discussed the matter earlier with the Lebanese ambassador to Washington and the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon. He added that “Israel refused to discuss a cease-fire with the Hezbollah terrorist organization, which continues to attack Israel and is the main obstacle to peace between the two countries.”
Mr. Nasr said that Iran most likely sees Lebanon as a key test not only of Mr. Trump’s trustworthiness, but also of his ability to control Mr. Netanyahu.
From Iran’s perspective, if Mr. Trump cannot make the Israeli leader stand down in Lebanon, he said, “at best that means the U.S. is unable to control Bibi” and Israeli officials, “which doesn’t give Iran much confidence.”
“At worst,” he added, “that means they can control him, and they have something else up their sleeve.”
Edward Wong contributed reporting.
Hezbollah said it had carried out a drone strike targeting Israeli soldiers gathered in a house in Chama, a town in southern Lebanon, in response to repeated Israeli violations of the cease-fire reached with Iran. Iran and Hezbollah say the cease-fire was meant to include Lebanon; the United States and Israel say it was not, and Israel has said it will keep attacking there.
There was no immediate word on casualties in the strike, which occurred early Saturday local time. But it underscored that fighting between Israel and Hezbollah is a major obstacle to peace between Hezbollah’s ally, Iran, and Israel and the United States.
Julian E. Barnes reports on national security and has been tracking the Iranian effort to mine the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran has been unable to open the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping traffic because it cannot locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them, according to U.S. officials.
The development is one reason Iran has not been able to quickly comply with the Trump administration’s admonitions to let more traffic pass through the strait. It is also potentially a complicating factor as Iranian negotiators and a U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance meet in Pakistan this weekend for peace talks.
Iran used small boats to mine the strait last month, soon after the United States and Israel began their war against the country. The mines, plus the threat of Iranian drone and missile attacks, slowed the number of oil tankers and other vessels passing through the strait to a trickle, driving up energy prices and providing Iran with its best leverage in the war.
Iran left a path through the strait open, allowing ships that pay a toll to pass through.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has issued warnings that ships could collide with sea mines, and semiofficial news organizations have published charts showing safe routes.
Those routes are limited in large part because Iran mined the strait haphazardly, U.S. officials said. It is not clear that Iran recorded where it put every mine. And even when the location was recorded, some mines were placed in a way that allowed them to drift or move, according to the officials.
As with land mines, removing nautical mines is far more difficult than placing them. The U.S. military lacks robust mine removal capabilities, relying on littoral combat ships equipped with mine sweeping capabilities. Iran also does not have the capability of quickly removing mines, even the ones it planted.
In a social media post on Tuesday discussing a pause in the American-Israeli war with Iran, President Trump said a two-week cease-fire was contingent on the “COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING” of the Strait of Hormuz.
On Wednesday, Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, said that the strait would be open to traffic “with due consideration of technical limitations.” American officials have said Mr. Araghchi’s comment about technical limitations was a reference to Iran’s inability to quickly find or remove the mines.
Mr. Araghchi is now in Islamabad for meetings on Saturday with Mr. Vance. Given Mr. Trump’s demands to open the strait, the issue of how quickly safe passage through the waterway can be increased is likely to be a point of discussion.
The U.S. military sought to destroy Iran’s navy, sinking ships and targeting naval bases. But Iran has hundreds of small boats that it can use to harass ships or lay mines. Destroying all of those small boats has proved impossible.
Even before Iran began laying mines, threats from its leaders quickly disrupted global shipping and sent oil prices up sharply. On March 2, a senior official with the Revolutionary Guards announced that the strait was closed and claimed Iran would set ships “ablaze” if they entered the waterway, according to state media.
In the days after that threat, Iran began mining the strait, even as the United States intensified strikes on Iranian naval assets. At the time, American officials said Iran was not planting mines quickly or efficiently.
Because it was difficult to track the small boats deploying the mines, the United States is uncertain precisely how many Iran has placed in the strait or where they are located.
Iran does not trust the United States, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the leader of Tehran’s negotiating team, said at the airport in Islamabad ahead of expected talks, according to Fars, a semi-official Iranian news agency. “We have goodwill, but we do not have trust,” said Ghalibaf, speaker of the Iranian Parliament. His country is open to a “real agreement,” he said, but he warned that it would pursue its aims by other means if talks become a “deceptive show.”
When asked if he had a backup plan in case peace talks fell through in Pakistan, President Trump told reporters: “You don’t need a back up plan. Their military is defeated. Their military is gone. We’ve degraded just about everything.” But Iran has shown that it can still fire back. Days before the cease-fire, Iranian forces shot down a U.S. fighter jet, an episode that culminated in dramatic operations to rescue two downed airmen deep in hostile territory.
Emerging in public for the first time in several days, President Trump spoke briefly to reporters before attending a political event in Virginia this afternoon. He had this message for Vice President JD Vance as he travels to Pakistan for negotiations with the Iranians: “I wish him well.”
Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan
Madeleine Albright, a former U.S. secretary of state, once compared Pakistan to “an international migraine.”
These days, its leaders are on a mission to offer the world a pain reliever.
Pakistan is set to host delegations from the United States and Iran on Saturday for the first formal talks since their war began on Feb. 28, the latest diplomatic feat from an unlikely mediator. Pakistan helped broker the cease-fire announced on Tuesday, just ahead of a deadline set by President Trump, who had threatened to erase Iranian civilization.
In Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, the authorities have blocked roads with shipping containers and barbed wire and deployed thousands of security personnel ahead of the talks between the U.S. and Iranian delegations, led by Vice President JD Vance and the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
Even hiking trails on the lush hills overlooking Islamabad have been closed to the public. To prepare for the talks, Pakistani officials declared Thursday and Friday public holidays.
They remain tight-lipped about the details though, including where and when the talks will take place and how long they will last, citing security concerns and the need to let Iranian and U.S. officials drive the negotiations.
The cease-fire was facilitated by Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, and by its army chief, Syed Asim Munir, who has nurtured a close relationship with Mr. Trump. China, an ally of both Iran and Pakistan, also made a last-minute diplomatic push.
But the cease-fire remains shaky. Iran is keeping a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, despite Mr. Trump’s demand to reopen it. And even as Mr. Vance was on his way to Pakistan, Mr. Ghalibaf said conditions for negotiations had not been met yet, citing continued Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon that have killed more than 1,800 people since the war began, according to Lebanese authorities.
Mr. Sharif said on Tuesday that the two-week cease-fire extended to Lebanon. Mr. Vance and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel later denied that.
Mr. Sharif and European leaders have urged Israel to stop its strikes in Lebanon, and Mr. Trump has said he had asked Mr. Netanyahu to scale back attacks on Lebanon.
“Pakistan enjoys trust on both sides and plays the role of a facilitator, a conciliator and a mediator,” said Inam Ul Haque, a retired Pakistani general. “But like many in this conflict, it is walking a very fine line.”
Pakistan’s role has drawn praise from leaders around the world, a remarkable turnaround for a country crippled with debt, at war with one neighbor, Afghanistan, and in constant tensions with another, India.
Pakistan has had one of South Asia’s most sluggish economic growth rates over the past few years, hovering just above 3 percent last year. It is slowly emerging from a 2022 crisis that brought it close to financial collapse. It was rescued by loans from China and Gulf countries.
Its allies and foes alike have often derided Pakistan as an unreliable partner. During the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, it played a double game, offering support to the United States while also sheltering the Taliban.
But its powerful army chief, Field Marshal Munir, has developed a warm personal relationship with Mr. Trump since last year. The two had also discussed Iran amid the 12-day war last June between Iran and Israel.
In recent weeks, Field Marshal Munir has been in regular touch with Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance, according to Pakistani and White House officials. Mr. Sharif and his foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, have worked the phones with leaders of other countries, including Iran, with which Pakistan shares a long, restive border and decades of deep, if sometimes fraught, bonds.
But Pakistan does not have diplomatic relations with Israel. On Thursday, Israeli officials accused Pakistan of not being a neutral arbiter after its defense minister, Khawaja Asif, posted a statement on social media with antisemitic undertones. Mr. Asif has since deleted the post.
Pakistan has an urgent interest in ending the war. It normally imports 85 percent of its oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz. More than half of the $40 billion in annual remittances to Pakistan are from citizens working in the Gulf. And Iran’s attacks on Saudi Arabia have threatened to drag Pakistan into the conflict under a Saudi-Pakistani defense agreement, under which an attack on one country is considered an attack on the other.
“Pakistan sees the Middle East as the most important region in the world for its interests,” said Michael Kugelman, a senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council, a think tank. “It might be more vulnerable to the war’s effects than any country in the region because of its dependence on the Middle East and geography.”
Pakistan’s immediate proximity to Iran has also left it exposed to the risk of violence in its border province of Balochistan, where security forces are already fighting lethal insurgencies.
The violence there has driven terrorism-related deaths in Pakistan to their highest point since 2013, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace, a research group. It said Pakistan in 2025 suffered the largest number of casualties from terrorist incidents of any country in the world, with 1,139 people killed.
Islamabad, a city of about a million people, had lately been spared the effects of terrorism. But it suffered two attacks in recent months, including a February suicide bombing at a mosque that killed more than 30 worshipers and injured nearly 170 others. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for it.
Officials are also worried about retaliatory violence from Afghanistan, where the Pakistani military has carried out dozens of airstrikes since late February. Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of supporting a terrorist group that has carried out hundreds of attacks on Pakistani soil in recent years.
As Pakistan was brokering the Middle East cease-fire, some of its officials discreetly met with their Afghan counterparts for talks in China. Both sides said they would continue the talks and refrain from escalating the conflict, according to China.
Euan Ward reported from Beirut, Lebanon, Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer from Tel Aviv, and Aaron Boxerman from Jerusalem.
Israel and Lebanon’s ambassadors to the United States are expected to meet in Washington next week for direct talks, according to three Lebanese officials, one Israeli official and another person familiar with the matter.
The initial round of talks will be largely preparatory, meaning a final settlement to end the war in Lebanon is not expected imminently, according to one of the Lebanese officials and the person briefed on the talks, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
With U.S. and Iranian officials set to meet for peace talks in Pakistan on Saturday, the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors also spoke by phone on Friday in the presence of U.S. officials.
During that call, they agreed to meet in Washington on Tuesday, according to statements from both countries, but the two framed the scope of that first meeting differently.
According to a statement from the office of President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon, the parties agreed to hold their first meeting “next Tuesday at the U.S. State Department to discuss announcing a cease-fire and setting a date for the start of negotiations between Lebanon and Israel under U.S. auspices.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, said in a statement that Israel had “agreed to begin formal peace negotiations this coming Tuesday,” and that it “refused to discuss a cease-fire” with Hezbollah.
Whether Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon, is included in the Iran cease-fire is one of the major disputes rattling the truce.
Israel has intensified its attacks in Lebanon since that deal was reached. Iranian officials have warned that negotiations in Pakistan would not begin without a halt in the fighting there — raising the risk that President Trump’s diplomatic push with Tehran could collapse.
Lebanon and Israel do not maintain diplomatic relations, and their officials have met only intermittently in the past half-century, making the meeting on U.S. soil historic. But it does not amount to high-level peace talks between government ministers. And the talks face enormous hurdles from the outset, in part because the Lebanese government has no direct control over Hezbollah, which has long signaled opposition to direct talks with Israel and resisted disarming.
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Mr. Leiter, and his Lebanese counterpart, Nada Hamadeh Moawad, will lead their countries’ delegations, according to the three Lebanese officials, the Israeli official and the other person familiar with the talks. The U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Michel Issa, will also be present, said one Lebanese official and the person familiar with the matter.
Before the parallel talks in Pakistan, a phone call including Mr. Leiter, Ms. Hamadeh Moawad, Mr. Issa, and Mike Needham, a senior State Department official, was also scheduled for Friday.
The diplomatic movements follow a devastating wave of Israeli airstrikes on Wednesday that killed more than 300 people in Beirut and elsewhere in Lebanon, including the south, where Israeli forces have invaded amid the latest war with Hezbollah. The conflict began after the militant group fired rockets into Israel last month in solidarity with Tehran.
Mr. Aoun, the Lebanese president, called Wednesday’s attack “a new massacre” that added to Israel’s “dark record,” while Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, claimed scores of those killed were militants.
The State Department confirmed on Thursday that it would host a meeting next week with representatives of Israel and Lebanon to discuss cease-fire negotiations, but did not provide details. That followed a statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel that he had ordered his government to start direct talks with Lebanon focused on disarming Hezbollah and establishing peaceful relations.
Mr. Netanyahu said, however, that Israel would continue its attacks against the group.
Michael Crowley and Dayana Iwaza contributed reporting.
Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan
Less than 24 hours before U.S. and Iranian officials are expected to meet here for high-level peace talks, Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, is locked down.
The authorities have blocked roads with shipping containers and barbed wire, deployed security forces across the city, and sealed off a two-mile radius around the Serena Hotel, where parts of the delegations are scheduled to stay. Even the hiking trails on the lush hills overlooking the city have been closed to the public.
Pakistani officials declared Thursday and Friday as public holidays to prepare the capital, a quiet, green and residential city of just over a million residents in a country of 250 million people.
The Pakistani authorities have disclosed almost no details about the talks, including where they will be held, citing security concerns and the need to let Iranian and U.S. officials drive the negotiations.
Still, Pakistan’s government has welcomed its moment in the international diplomatic spotlight. World leaders in Europe and the Middle East have thanked Pakistan for its mediation efforts. Editorials in Pakistani newspapers have heralded a new era for the country as a regional power broker.
The Pakistani foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, even said that Iranian and U.S. journalists covering the talks could travel to Pakistan and obtain a visa on arrival — a highly unusual measure in a country where foreign reporters usually wait weeks or months before obtaining permission to enter.
Read the full story at nyt News.
Monthly Report
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/11/2026, 3:58:51 PM
It’s the 30th anniversary of National Poetry Month, begun in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. I’m celebrating it in my own fashion, reading favorite poems about April. T.S. Eliot dubbed it “the cruellest month.” Edna St. Vincent Millay was equally suspicious: “It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, / April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” An idiot! When I read those lines, spring fever beginning to throb in my veins, I feel like Millay is mocking me for being so awed, again, by the magnolia blossoms flinging open their floppy petals for a brief window of delirium.
To Ogden Nash, April was “Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy.” There’s the cruelty again, but he ends having come to appreciate the month’s contradictions: “I love April, I love you.” Langston Hughes’s “April Rain Song” concludes similarly: “The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night / And I love the rain.”
April has, in the Northeast, been inconstant as always. A perfect spring bike ride there; a windy, rainy hustle back. The poems tend to capture this fickle quality. As Robert Frost put it: “The sun was warm but the wind was chill. / You know how it is with an April day.”
We do. April days contain multiple seasons. There’s a lesson in there, if we want to take it, about holding multiple things at once. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, the challenge of containing conflicting emotions, conflicting ideas, the alternately sunny and stormy fronts of the internal weather system. I’ve been writing this new newsletter, The Good List (you should sign up!), and while it’s meant to catalog things that bring joy, it’s not meant to deny that there are difficult things in the world, or to avoid the inevitable contradictions that come from loving things: beautiful films about sad subjects, art that emerges from suffering. Things aren’t only good (or only bad). I often return to these lines from David Ferry’s translation of Horace: “It’s true that Jupiter brings on the hard winters; / It’s also true that Jupiter takes them away.”
Certainty is easier. April, in much of the country, is liminal, vacillating between winter and spring, refusing to resolve cleanly. If you look closely, you can observe this tension: the tulips quivering in the gusting wind; people in shorts and people wearing mittens on the same block; stepping onto the porch to see a robin and instead seeing your own breath. The internal work is much the same. Sitting quietly, paying close attention to the weather inside, you can observe the hope that blows in with the fear, the lightness and heaviness that seem to be competing. The psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach advises greeting each experience that arises within us with the phrase “this too,” accepting what’s there, even if it’s uncomfortable.
So: How are you celebrating National Poetry Month? You might listen to “The Poetry Magazine Podcast,” or, if you’re less inclined to embrace it, read the writer Ben Lerner on “The Hatred of Poetry.” Or better yet, embrace April’s spirit of contradictions and do both. While I was writing this, a friend sent me a poem by Jane Hirshfield that reminded me of poetry’s enduring potency: “Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. / Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.”
Peace talks are set to begin today in Pakistan. Vice President JD Vance is leading the American delegation, which includes Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
World leaders, trying to keep the negotiations on track, have called on Israel to halt its attacks on Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.
The scale of the fighting in Lebanon is staggering, with more than a million people forced from their homes. See what’s happening, in photos and video.
The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz is central to the talks. But Iran has been slow to do so, in part because it can’t locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway, U.S. officials say.
The Times has uncovered additional evidence that U.S.-made missiles struck a sports hall and school on the war’s first day. The strikes killed 21 people, including five children.
Prices in the U.S. rose 0.9 percent over the course of March, the highest monthly gain since the peak of the post-pandemic inflation crisis in 2022.
Gas is getting expensive, and it’s driving prices up in seemingly far-off places like grocery stores and airports. It could strain consumer spending, which has been keeping a recession at bay.
Still, the S&P 500 ended the week up 3.6 percent — its strongest showing since November.
Several women accused Eric Swalwell, the California congressman running for governor, of sexual misconduct. He denied the accusations.
The Trump administration released its latest plan for a triumphal arch in Washington. It would rise 250 feet, across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial.
A judge declined to block the Trump administration from rushing deportations of Somali migrants, while acknowledging that the government most likely singled out those people.
The Artemis II astronauts splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean, concluding their historic 10-day mission, the first to send humans around the moon in more than 50 years.
A 20-year-old man was arrested and accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at the San Francisco home of Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI.
A new season of “Euphoria” starts Sunday. Since the show’s debut in 2019, three of its stars have climbed to the top of the Hollywood A-list.
With its focus on the possibilities and vulnerabilities of teenage girls, “The Testaments,” Hulu’s follow-up to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” feels as prescient as ever, our critic writes.
The satirical superhero series “The Boys,” which returned to Prime Video this week, won over a broad base of fans. Its showrunner, Eric Kripke, told The Times why he felt it was time to end the story.
Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” is back on Broadway — yet again in triumph, our critic Helen Shaw writes. (During the play’s first run, in 1949, The Times’s critic raved about it twice.)
The singer Pink will host the Tony Awards this year. Her songs are part of the Broadway shows “& Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.”
Rosamund Pike, a star of “Gone Girl” and “Saltburn,” will make her Broadway debut this fall in the legal drama “Inter Alia.”
An exhibition explores what people 500 years ago found beautiful and hideous — and how the two often go together.
Alissa Wilkinson, a Times critic, reviews the new film “You, Me & Tuscany” in the video below. Click to watch.
������ Margo’s Got Money Troubles (Wednesday): Rufi Thorpe’s delectable novel about on-camera sex work, family both found and biological, and one young woman’s messy, vibrant networks of mutual care has become a delightful Apple TV series, adapted by David E. Kelley. Elle Fanning stars as Margo, a Southern California college student who becomes pregnant and takes an unusual approach to making ends meet. (Let’s just say it involves viral dances and a lot of body paint.) Unstinting in its comedy and its humanity, the show is especially insightful about the ways that people fail and redeem each other. The dynamite cast includes Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman and Greg Kinnear.
The Hunt: A couple leaving the Midwest for new opportunities in Albuquerque, N.M., looked for a home that could accommodate a dog, three cats, 30 plants and 75 pounds of rocks. What did they find? Play our game.
What you get for $650,000 in Portugal: A duplex in Almada. A modern apartment in Lisbon. A rowhouse in Porto.
A new coat: Paint is perhaps the easiest way to change the look of a room. To find the best kind for your project, look at the SPAM: solvents, pigments, additives and materials.
Work in progress: A landscape designer has been adding color, personality and whimsical surprise to his Seattle home for more than 15 years, and he has no plans to stop.
Achoo! Allergies can be miserable. Why does your immune system treat pollen like a parasite?
Everyday influencers: The latest trend in food criticism is casual, personal reviews that seem like a conversation with a friend.
We can’t control the budding trees and blooming flowers that set off our seasonal allergies. But we can take steps to freshen the air indoors. First, an air purifier is a simple and effective way to capture common airborne allergens, including pollen. (If you already own one, make sure to clean the prefilter monthly.) A quality bagged vacuum can also make a big difference, because it sucks dust and debris into a sealed bag that won’t blow back into your face. Finally, for dust that lingers on flat surfaces, ditch the feather duster. A damp rag or microfiber cloth will do a better job of keeping allergens from becoming airborne. — Brittney Ho
The Masters. Live sports are sensory experiences, and it’s hard not to feel some jealousy when watching the Masters on a screen — how nice it must be to feel the warmth of the Georgia sun, to taste the pimento cheese sandwich that still costs just $1.50.
But perhaps no sporting event translates senses through the television as well as the Masters does. This weekend, if you’ve got it on, crank the volume, close your eyes and let yourself be whisked away: the birdsong and the whispered commentary and the soft thwack of a seven iron, all deliciously clear over the strictly enforced silence of the gallery. Or, if golf A.S.M.R. isn’t your thing, open your eyes and get lost in the sea of green fairways, so verdant it’s hard to believe they’re real.
The latest: Rory McIlroy, last year’s champion, holds a six-shot lead over the field. Even the usual final-round drama might not be enough to stop him.
Today and tomorrow, 2 p.m. Eastern on CBS
Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was oxidizing.
Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines.
Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa
Melissa Kirsch hosts The Good List, a weekly newsletter of things, big and small, to add joy and meaning to life, and writes The Morning newsletter on Saturdays.
Read the full story at nyt News.
There are few public details about the high-level talks — not even the timing.
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/11/2026, 3:40:09 PM
Beirut1:38 p.m. April 11
Pinned
Elian PeltierTyler PagerJohn Yoon and Aaron Boxerman
Elian Peltier and Tyler Pager reported from Islamabad, Pakistan.
Vice President JD Vance arrived in Pakistan on Saturday for peace negotiations with Iranian officials, as disagreements over the Israeli assault in Lebanon and Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz rattled the fragile cease-fire.
Mr. Vance later met with top officials from Pakistan, which brokered the two-week truce to suspend fighting between Israel, the United States and Iran. Much was still unclear about the talks, including whether the negotiations would be conducted face-to-face or solely via mediators.
The stakes are high: The five-week war brought chaos across the Middle East, and the temporary truce remains brittle. In a Friday address, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan called it a “make or break” moment.
Israel and the United States attacked Iran in late February, killing many of Iran’s top leaders and calling for the ouster of its government. Iranian retaliatory attacks have since drawn in much of the Middle East and battered the world economy. Iran also began blockading the Strait of Hormuz, sending global energy prices skyrocketing.
The full reopening of the Persian Gulf waterway, a vital passage for oil and gas, will be among the priorities for Mr. Vance during the negotiations. Iran’s military signaled in a statement on Friday that it would maintain control of the strait.
Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon against Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group, has also threatened to derail the truce. Iran had accused Israel of breaking the cease-fire by continuing to attack in Lebanon, leading Mr. Trump to ask Israel to rein in its assault.
Israeli fighter jets have not attacked the Lebanese capital of Beirut since Wednesday. But Israel has kept up its airstrikes in southern Lebanon, including on Saturday morning, according to Lebanon’s state media.
Both the United States and Iran have claimed that the other side was desperate to make a deal. Hours before the Iranians arrived in Pakistan, Mr. Ghalibaf, one of the key figures overseeing the war, cast doubt that the talks would even take place, demanding a cease-fire in Lebanon and the release of unspecified Iranian “blocked assets.”
Mr. Trump suggested on social media that Iran was overplaying its hand. “The Iranians don’t seem to realize they have no cards, other than a short term extortion of the World by using International Waterways,” he wrote, referring to Iran’s continued control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Here’s what else we’re covering:
Negotiating team: Mr. Vance was joined in Islamabad by President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The Iranian delegation, which includes Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, arrived earlier in the Pakistani capital. Read more about them here.
Strait of Hormuz: Only two ships passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Friday. U.S. officials said one reason Iran had been unable to get more ships through was that it could not locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacked the capability to remove them.
Israel and Lebanon: The countries’ ambassadors to the United States are expected to meet in Washington next week for direct talks, but a settlement to end the war in Lebanon is not expected imminently. More than a million people — roughly a fifth of the population — have been forced from their homes since the renewed war erupted last month between Israel and Hezbollah. Take a closer look in photos and video here.
Death tolls: The Human Rights Activists News Agency said at least 1,701 civilians, including 254 children, had been killed in Iran as of Wednesday. Lebanon’s health ministry on Friday said that at least 1,953 people had been killed in the latest fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, including 357 in a wave of Israeli strikes on Wednesday. In attacks attributed to Iran, at least 32 people have been killed in Gulf nations. In Israel, at least 20 people had been killed as of Monday. The American death toll stands at 13 service members.
Vice President JD Vance held a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan on Saturday, the White House said. The U.S. delegation also includes Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. The Pakistani delegation included Mohsin Naqvi, the interior minister, and Ishaq Dar, the foreign minister.
Dozens of reporters gathered in Islamabad to cover the U.S.-Iranian negotiations are mostly in the dark about the talks, despite being within walking distance of the hotel where they are expected to occur. “No one knows when, where, or how these talks are taking place,” Nadir Guramani, a Pakistani journalist, said at the Jinnah Convention Center, a sprawling government complex where the press was gathered. “We do not even know what is happening outside, as movement across the city is restricted,” he added.
But even after his arrival in Islamabad, the timing of any talks remained unclear. Iranian officials threatened at various points to refuse direct meetings if the United States did not accede to various demands, including unfreezing Iran’s overseas assets and expanding the cease-fire to include Lebanon.
The White House did not share any schedule, with officials emphasizing the sensitivity and fluidity of the negotiations. It was unclear how many meetings the U.S. delegation — which included Steve Witkoff, President Trump's special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law — would hold while in Pakistan. They were not even sure how long they would stay in the country.
By Saturday afternoon, the American delegation had held one meeting with foreign counterparts: a bilateral engagement with Pakistan. Mr. Vance, Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner met with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan and other Pakistani officials. The White House did not provide a statement about the meeting.
The talks are being held amid a fragile cease-fire that Pakistan negotiated hours before a Tuesday deadline set by Mr. Trump. The president had threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization if the country did not agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The in-person talks were announced the day after the cease-fire deal, even amid disagreements about what the cease-fire included and whether each side was holding up its end of the arrangement.
Mr. Vance, meanwhile, finds himself leading an American delegation to negotiate a lasting peace for a war he adamantly opposed starting. He repeatedly raised concerns before the conflict, telling colleagues that regime-change war would be a disaster.
And yet on Saturday morning, Mr. Vance arrived in Islamabad, greeted by a delegation of Pakistani leaders and given a bouquet of flowers by a young boy. He made a brief stop at the U.S. Embassy before continuing on to the Serena Hotel, the five-star hotel that was emptied out earlier in the week to accommodate the delegations.
Throughout Islamabad, Pakistani officials have affixed signs on lampposts and billboards with the American, Pakistani and Iranian flags to advertise the negotiations, which they have dubbed the “Islamabad Talks.”
When the United States and Iran agreed to a cease-fire this week, many Iranians welcomed the reprieve from a devastating war that had stretched for over five weeks. But some hard-line supporters of the government were left deeply unhappy.
At a march held on Thursday in Tehran to commemorate the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who was killed at the outset of the U.S.-Israeli campaign, some demonstrators held signs that read: “Cease-fire is prohibited. It’s time for revenge” and “No compromise, no surrender. Fight until victory.”
The hard-liners’ distaste for negotiations with the United States is adding to the pressure on Iranian officials as they engage with their American counterparts on Saturday in Pakistan to discuss terms for an end to the war.
Conservative Iranians opposed to the cease-fire argue that the United States and its ally Israel have proven that they cannot be trusted. They point to the last two rounds of negotiations between Iran and the United States, which were interrupted by military attacks on Iran.
They are furious that Israel has continued to strike Lebanon in the days after the cease-fire was agreed. And they believe that Iran was winning the war, and now risks squandering that advantage.
“What happened was #diplomatic_sabotage in the midst of battlefield success,” wrote Seyed Ehsan Hosseini, an energy journalist who previously worked at a news outlet affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, in an X post on the second day of the cease-fire. “Abandon Lebanon, and God will abandon us.”
After President Trump wrote on social media that Iran could not enrich uranium, something it has claimed as an inherent right, Ebrahim Rezaei, a member of Iran’s parliament and spokesman for the legislature’s national security and foreign policy committee, called for Iranian officials to “cancel negotiations with the defeated devil so they know that we are not in a position of weakness.”
Hard-liners within Iran generally have more freedom to harshly criticize the government, especially the conduct and policy decisions of elected figures who come from more moderate camps.
Some of those conservative figures have been upset for years over what they see as inadequate deterrence against attacks by the United States and Israel, believing this has emboldened Iran’s enemies to act more aggressively against the country.
Much of the Iranian population is opposed to the current government, and the country has seen round after round of nationwide protests demanding an end to the Islamic republic.
Given that limited popular support, ensuring the backing of its base is especially important for the government.
If this round of negotiations were to again be cut short by strikes on Iran, or if Iranian officials were seen to be conceding too much, the support of those hard-liners could be at risk.
Iran’s delegation has met with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan, Iranian state television reported in a short update on Saturday. Pakistan is mediating talks between the United States and Iran.
In the coastal city of Sidon, Lebanon, mourners paid tribute to 13 state security personnel who were killed the previous day by an Israeli strike in the southern city of Nabatieh. Israel says it is striking Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia backed by Iran. But the attacks have threatened to derail the U.S.-Iranian cease-fire, and several countries have called for Lebanon to be included in the truce.
State media in Lebanon reported renewed gunfire and Israeli military activity in the country’s south on Saturday. The National News Agency said an Israeli attack helicopter fired toward the town of Taybeh. Continued Israeli strikes against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group, have raised concerns about the stability of the cease-fire, as international calls grow to extend the truce to Lebanon.
Vice President JD Vance has arrived at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad for planned talks with Pakistani and Iranian officials. The White House has not released a schedule.
The U.S. and Iranian delegations are now both in Islamabad for what Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan has described as “a make or break moment.” Pakistan’s army chief and foreign minister welcomed Vice President JD Vance to the country on Saturday. After Vance’s arrival, Ishaq Dar, the foreign minister, “expressed the hope that parties would engage constructively” in the talks, which are expected to start a few hours from now. First, both delegations are scheduled to meet with Sharif.
Throughout Islamabad, Pakistani officials have put up signs advertising the negotiations. The signs say “Islamabad Talks April 2026” with the flags of Pakistan, the United States and Iran.
Vice President JD Vance has arrived in Islamabad for talks with Iran. He landed around 10:30 a.m. local time and was greeted by Pakistani officials at the Nur Khan air force base. He received a bouquet of flowers from a young boy before walking down a red carpet surrounded by an honor guard. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who arrived in Pakistan separately, met him at the end of the red carpet.
The U.S.-Iran talks in Islamabad are scheduled to take place at the five-star Serena Hotel, according to Pakistani officials who were not authorized to speak publicly because of the sensitivity around the event. The hotel was emptied earlier this week to host the delegations. We are reporting from a convention center across the road that has been arranged for the dozens of journalists covering the talks, but we have not been granted access to the Serena.
Farnaz Fassihi has covered Iran for three decades, living and traveling throughout the country. She was a war correspondent based in the Middle East for 15 years.
An Iranian team led by the veteran politician and military commander Gen. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf are scheduled to negotiate with an American delegation headed by Vice President JD Vance on Saturday in Islamabad, Pakistan, to discuss a possible end to the war.
The stakes are high for both sides. The war is deeply unpopular in the United States and President Trump is looking for an exit ramp. Iran has been pummeled with airstrikes, leaving its infrastructure severely destroyed and its economy in ruins.
“We have good will, but we do not have trust,” Mr. Ghalibaf, who is the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, said upon arriving in Islamabad on Friday evening. He pointed out that two earlier rounds of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, in June and February, ended with military strikes instead of a deal.
Iran appears to be taking the talks on Saturday seriously. The delegation of at least 70 people includes experienced diplomats and negotiators, experts in finance and sanctions, military officials and legal advisers, according to Iranian media and a list of the delegation seen by The New York Times.
Notable officials in the Iranian camp include Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi; Ali Bagheri Kani, a member of Iran’s National Security Council; Admiral Ali Akbar Ahmadian, a former chief of staff for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and secretary of the National Security Council; Gen. Esmail Ahmadi Moghadam, a retired military commander who is now the head of Iran’s National Defense University; and Abdolnasser Hemati, governor of the Central Bank of Iran.
Three senior Iranian officials familiar with the talks said Iran’s team had full authority to make decisions in Pakistan and was not required to consult with Tehran given the critical nature of the negotiations. The officials, who asked not to be named because they were discussing sensitive issues, said the new supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei had given Mr. Ghalibaf, who is a close friend and ally, the power to make a deal or walk away.
Iran’s vice president, Mohammad Reza Aref, said in a social media post on Friday that Mr. Ghalibaf was now “representing the nation and the nezam,” using the Persian word for the Islamic Republic’s entire system, which includes not only the elected government but also the supreme leader. “I wish him success,” Mr. Aref said.
“What we can read from Iran’s delegation is that they have not come to stonewall,” said Vali Nasr, a professor of Middle Eastern studies and an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University. “They have come with full authority and seriousness to reach a deal with the United States.”
Mr. Nasr, who also served in the State Department as a special U.S. representative to Afghanistan during the Obama administration, said that typically such a large delegation of experts would only be deployed if negotiations were in the final stages of a deal, not for an initial testing of the waters.
If Mr. Ghalibaf and Mr. Vance meet in person on Saturday it will represent a major turn in relations between the United States and Iran and the highest-level meeting of officials since diplomatic relations ruptured in 1979. Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, will accompany Mr. Vance and both have negotiated with the Iranians before.
Mr. Nasr said that Tehran and Washington might have advanced in talks further than publicly known during back-channel messaging mediated by Pakistan over the past week. Washington sent Tehran a 15-point peace plan and Iran replied with its own 10-point counter plan, which Mr. Trump said would be the framework for talks when he announced the cease-fire on Tuesday.
Among the issues on the table are ending the war, opening the Strait of Hormuz to ships and Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s interests include securing comprehensive sanctions relief, the release of frozen funds and compensation for damage during the war.
Iran has said that any peace deal, temporary or permanent, must also include its closest regional ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. This has been an especially fraught point of contention since massive Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon killed more than 300 people on Wednesday.
Iranian officials, true to form, traveled with symbolism. They arrived wearing head-to-toe black suits and shirts, a sign of mourning. On their plane, according to photographs and videos on Iranian state media, photos and backpacks filled empty seats to represent the nearly 170 children killed in an elementary school when an American tomahawk missile struck it.
Iranian state media said the delegation would meet with Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, at noon on Saturday ahead of meeting with the Americans.
Omid Memarian, a senior fellow and Iran expert at Dawn Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit focused on American foreign policy, said the large delegation was meant to signal that Iran’s top leaders were backing it.
“The most important message Iran is sending with the composition of its delegation,” he said, “is that there is internal consensus for negotiations and a deal at the highest levels of the regime.”
Shirin Hakim contributed reporting.
Reporting from Washington
Even as Air Force Two carried Vice President JD Vance toward Pakistan for weekend talks with Iran, President Trump’s shaky cease-fire with Tehran was in growing jeopardy as world leaders hastened efforts to prevent a return to all-out war.
For a third day, work to prop up the cease-fire, which was announced on Tuesday, focused on Israel’s attacks on Lebanon. Iran says the continued assault violates its deal with Mr. Trump to stop U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran in exchange for safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has resisted international pressure to halt his country’s related campaign against Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon.
Iran had threatened to call off its meeting with Mr. Vance at a luxury hotel in Islamabad, set for Saturday morning local time. The arrival of an Iranian delegation in Islamabad on Friday, even after Mr. Netanyahu vowed to continue his Lebanon offensive, suggested that the talks would commence as planned.
With the future of the world economy at stake, several foreign nations worked to keep diplomacy between Washington and Tehran on track. On Friday, the World Bank’s president, Ajay Banga, told Reuters that a return to war and further Iranian disruption of commercial shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz could significantly slow global economic growth and exacerbate inflation.
Mindful of such bleak scenarios, top officials from across Europe and Asia joined countless calls and meetings on the subject with their counterparts. France’s president pressured Israel to halt its attacks in Lebanon. Britain’s prime minister finished a three-day visit to Gulf Arab capitals to discuss the strait’s reopening. Saudi Arabian officials urged China to continue its pressure on Iran to remain engaged in diplomacy.
In a Friday address to his nation, Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said the planned U.S. meeting with Iran was a “make or break” moment. And Mr. Sharif — until now not known as a kingpin of international diplomacy — said on social media that he had fielded calls from a slew of world leaders, including from Qatar, Germany, Australia and Britain.
Even if the dispute over Lebanon does not derail the Islamabad talks, said Vali R. Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, it will have further poisoned the atmosphere for discussions between the two sides after five weeks of warfare and decades of distrust.
That will make bridging the wide divide between Washington and Tehran on Iran’s nuclear program, the Strait of Hormuz and other matters even more difficult. Veteran diplomats were already doubtful that a larger agreement was possible without at least extending the two-week clock established by Tuesday’s cease-fire.
“Lebanon has changed the context of the talks,” Mr. Nasr said. Iran has stressed its view that the cease-fire was supposed to apply to Lebanon. Although Mr. Vance on Wednesday claimed there had been a “misunderstanding” over the status of Lebanon, Mr. Sharif’s announcement of the deal — which was edited in advance by the Trump White House — called for an end to the fighting there.
“If you’re already thinking that this guy, Mr. Trump, may cheat you, that doesn’t augur well,” Mr. Nasr said.
Tehran has other reasons to distrust Mr. Trump and his emissaries, he noted. During his first term as president, Mr. Trump abandoned a 2015 nuclear deal that Iran had painstakingly negotiated with the Obama administration over roughly 20 months. And twice in the past year, Mr. Trump has begun talks with Tehran only to launch devastating attacks without warning.
Mr. Vance will be joined in Islamabad by Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who participated in the previous rounds of nuclear talks with Iran — and who came away insisting the Iranians were the deceitful party. The three Americans plan to negotiate with Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, and the Iranian parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
It is unclear whether the two sides will meet in person or pass messages through Pakistani intermediaries. Diplomats say that direct meetings are far more efficient and less prone to miscommunication, but can also bring political risk by appearing conciliatory.
The talks are to be held at Islamabad’s five-star Serena Hotel, whose guests were abruptly instructed this week to check out because Pakistan’s government had “requisitioned our hotel for an important event,” according to Russia’s TASS news service.
The talks may be shaped by outside powers invested in their success. Among them is China, whose economy depends heavily on gas and oil shipped from Gulf Arab nations through the Strait of Hormuz.
“Any escalation or expansion of the conflict would run counter to China’s interests in stable and functioning global energy markets,” said Ryan Hass, a former career diplomat and White House national security official who directs the China center at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Hass said that would support reports that Beijing urged Tehran to accept the cease-fire, including Mr. Sharif’s message of public thanks to several nations, including China, after the deal was concluded.
A Saudi official said that Riyadh has encouraged China to remain involved as the diplomacy proceeds.
Liu Pengyu, the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said in a statement that China has been working since the conflict began “to help bring about a cease-fire and end to the conflict.”
Experts said the cease-fire has held despite serious flaws because both sides are eager for some kind of deal. Iran has been under crushing military and economic pressure but has considerable leverage in its demonstrated ability to close the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Trump has endured rising gas prices, tepid support for the war and dissent from within his political base.
But few actors foresaw Lebanon as posing so much danger to peace efforts.
Mr. Trump has never expressed much interest in the country, which is smaller than Connecticut, with a battered economy and few natural resources.
But Lebanon is of critical importance to Mr. Netanyahu as the home base of Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group formed with Iran’s backing after Israel’s 1982 invasion of southern Lebanon. Israel has long traded cross-border fire and occasionally gone to war with Hezbollah.
But after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks highlighted the threat Israel faces from armed militias on its borders, Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to see the group — which regularly launches rocket attacks into Israel from southern Lebanon — disarmed under a long-stalled United Nations mandate or destroyed.
After a call on Wednesday from Mr. Trump asking him to scale back attacks in Lebanon, Mr. Netanyahu announced that Israel would join talks with Lebanon’s government to discuss Hezbollah’s disarmament. The State Department then announced that it would host the parties for a meeting in Washington next week.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump sounded reassured, saying that Mr. Netanyahu would be “scaling back” operations in Lebanon.
But there has been little evidence of that, and Mr. Netanyahu seemed to double down in a public statement, saying he had not agreed to a cease-fire in Lebanon and vowing he would continue “to strike Hezbollah with full force.”
Fearing for the survival of the Iran talks, other world leaders have sought to pressure Mr. Netanyahu. On Wednesday, President Emmanuel Macron of France condemned what he called Israel’s “indiscriminate strikes” in Lebanon that day.
Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, said in a statement on Friday that he had discussed the matter earlier with the Lebanese ambassador to Washington and the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon. He added that “Israel refused to discuss a cease-fire with the Hezbollah terrorist organization, which continues to attack Israel and is the main obstacle to peace between the two countries.”
Mr. Nasr said that Iran most likely sees Lebanon as a key test not only of Mr. Trump’s trustworthiness, but also of his ability to control Mr. Netanyahu.
From Iran’s perspective, if Mr. Trump cannot make the Israeli leader stand down in Lebanon, he said, “at best that means the U.S. is unable to control Bibi” and Israeli officials, “which doesn’t give Iran much confidence.”
“At worst,” he added, “that means they can control him, and they have something else up their sleeve.”
Edward Wong contributed reporting.
Hezbollah said it had carried out a drone strike targeting Israeli soldiers gathered in a house in Chama, a town in southern Lebanon, in response to repeated Israeli violations of the cease-fire reached with Iran. Iran and Hezbollah say the cease-fire was meant to include Lebanon; the United States and Israel say it was not, and Israel has said it will keep attacking there.
There was no immediate word on casualties in the strike, which occurred early Saturday local time. But it underscored that fighting between Israel and Hezbollah is a major obstacle to peace between Hezbollah’s ally, Iran, and Israel and the United States.
Julian E. Barnes reports on national security and has been tracking the Iranian effort to mine the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran has been unable to open the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping traffic because it cannot locate all of the mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them, according to U.S. officials.
The development is one reason Iran has not been able to quickly comply with the Trump administration’s admonitions to let more traffic pass through the strait. It is also potentially a complicating factor as Iranian negotiators and a U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance meet in Pakistan this weekend for peace talks.
Iran used small boats to mine the strait last month, soon after the United States and Israel began their war against the country. The mines, plus the threat of Iranian drone and missile attacks, slowed the number of oil tankers and other vessels passing through the strait to a trickle, driving up energy prices and providing Iran with its best leverage in the war.
Iran left a path through the strait open, allowing ships that pay a toll to pass through.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has issued warnings that ships could collide with sea mines, and semiofficial news organizations have published charts showing safe routes.
Those routes are limited in large part because Iran mined the strait haphazardly, U.S. officials said. It is not clear that Iran recorded where it put every mine. And even when the location was recorded, some mines were placed in a way that allowed them to drift or move, according to the officials.
As with land mines, removing nautical mines is far more difficult than placing them. The U.S. military lacks robust mine removal capabilities, relying on littoral combat ships equipped with mine sweeping capabilities. Iran also does not have the capability of quickly removing mines, even the ones it planted.
In a social media post on Tuesday discussing a pause in the American-Israeli war with Iran, President Trump said a two-week cease-fire was contingent on the “COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING” of the Strait of Hormuz.
On Wednesday, Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, said that the strait would be open to traffic “with due consideration of technical limitations.” American officials have said Mr. Araghchi’s comment about technical limitations was a reference to Iran’s inability to quickly find or remove the mines.
Mr. Araghchi is now in Islamabad for meetings on Saturday with Mr. Vance. Given Mr. Trump’s demands to open the strait, the issue of how quickly safe passage through the waterway can be increased is likely to be a point of discussion.
The U.S. military sought to destroy Iran’s navy, sinking ships and targeting naval bases. But Iran has hundreds of small boats that it can use to harass ships or lay mines. Destroying all of those small boats has proved impossible.
Even before Iran began laying mines, threats from its leaders quickly disrupted global shipping and sent oil prices up sharply. On March 2, a senior official with the Revolutionary Guards announced that the strait was closed and claimed Iran would set ships “ablaze” if they entered the waterway, according to state media.
In the days after that threat, Iran began mining the strait, even as the United States intensified strikes on Iranian naval assets. At the time, American officials said Iran was not planting mines quickly or efficiently.
Because it was difficult to track the small boats deploying the mines, the United States is uncertain precisely how many Iran has placed in the strait or where they are located.
Iran does not trust the United States, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the leader of Tehran’s negotiating team, said at the airport in Islamabad ahead of expected talks, according to Fars, a semi-official Iranian news agency. “We have goodwill, but we do not have trust,” said Ghalibaf, speaker of the Iranian Parliament. His country is open to a “real agreement,” he said, but he warned that it would pursue its aims by other means if talks become a “deceptive show.”
When asked if he had a backup plan in case peace talks fell through in Pakistan, President Trump told reporters: “You don’t need a back up plan. Their military is defeated. Their military is gone. We’ve degraded just about everything.” But Iran has shown that it can still fire back. Days before the cease-fire, Iranian forces shot down a U.S. fighter jet, an episode that culminated in dramatic operations to rescue two downed airmen deep in hostile territory.
Emerging in public for the first time in several days, President Trump spoke briefly to reporters before attending a political event in Virginia this afternoon. He had this message for Vice President JD Vance as he travels to Pakistan for negotiations with the Iranians: “I wish him well.”
Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan
Madeleine Albright, a former U.S. secretary of state, once compared Pakistan to “an international migraine.”
These days, its leaders are on a mission to offer the world a pain reliever.
Pakistan is set to host delegations from the United States and Iran on Saturday for the first formal talks since their war began on Feb. 28, the latest diplomatic feat from an unlikely mediator. Pakistan helped broker the cease-fire announced on Tuesday, just ahead of a deadline set by President Trump, who had threatened to erase Iranian civilization.
In Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, the authorities have blocked roads with shipping containers and barbed wire and deployed thousands of security personnel ahead of the talks between the U.S. and Iranian delegations, led by Vice President JD Vance and the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
Even hiking trails on the lush hills overlooking Islamabad have been closed to the public. To prepare for the talks, Pakistani officials declared Thursday and Friday public holidays.
They remain tight-lipped about the details though, including where and when the talks will take place and how long they will last, citing security concerns and the need to let Iranian and U.S. officials drive the negotiations.
The cease-fire was facilitated by Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, and by its army chief, Syed Asim Munir, who has nurtured a close relationship with Mr. Trump. China, an ally of both Iran and Pakistan, also made a last-minute diplomatic push.
But the cease-fire remains shaky. Iran is keeping a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, despite Mr. Trump’s demand to reopen it. And even as Mr. Vance was on his way to Pakistan, Mr. Ghalibaf said conditions for negotiations had not been met yet, citing continued Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon that have killed more than 1,800 people since the war began, according to Lebanese authorities.
Mr. Sharif said on Tuesday that the two-week cease-fire extended to Lebanon. Mr. Vance and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel later denied that.
Mr. Sharif and European leaders have urged Israel to stop its strikes in Lebanon, and Mr. Trump has said he had asked Mr. Netanyahu to scale back attacks on Lebanon.
“Pakistan enjoys trust on both sides and plays the role of a facilitator, a conciliator and a mediator,” said Inam Ul Haque, a retired Pakistani general. “But like many in this conflict, it is walking a very fine line.”
Pakistan’s role has drawn praise from leaders around the world, a remarkable turnaround for a country crippled with debt, at war with one neighbor, Afghanistan, and in constant tensions with another, India.
Pakistan has had one of South Asia’s most sluggish economic growth rates over the past few years, hovering just above 3 percent last year. It is slowly emerging from a 2022 crisis that brought it close to financial collapse. It was rescued by loans from China and Gulf countries.
Its allies and foes alike have often derided Pakistan as an unreliable partner. During the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, it played a double game, offering support to the United States while also sheltering the Taliban.
But its powerful army chief, Field Marshal Munir, has developed a warm personal relationship with Mr. Trump since last year. The two had also discussed Iran amid the 12-day war last June between Iran and Israel.
In recent weeks, Field Marshal Munir has been in regular touch with Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance, according to Pakistani and White House officials. Mr. Sharif and his foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, have worked the phones with leaders of other countries, including Iran, with which Pakistan shares a long, restive border and decades of deep, if sometimes fraught, bonds.
But Pakistan does not have diplomatic relations with Israel. On Thursday, Israeli officials accused Pakistan of not being a neutral arbiter after its defense minister, Khawaja Asif, posted a statement on social media with antisemitic undertones. Mr. Asif has since deleted the post.
Pakistan has an urgent interest in ending the war. It normally imports 85 percent of its oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz. More than half of the $40 billion in annual remittances to Pakistan are from citizens working in the Gulf. And Iran’s attacks on Saudi Arabia have threatened to drag Pakistan into the conflict under a Saudi-Pakistani defense agreement, under which an attack on one country is considered an attack on the other.
“Pakistan sees the Middle East as the most important region in the world for its interests,” said Michael Kugelman, a senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council, a think tank. “It might be more vulnerable to the war’s effects than any country in the region because of its dependence on the Middle East and geography.”
Pakistan’s immediate proximity to Iran has also left it exposed to the risk of violence in its border province of Balochistan, where security forces are already fighting lethal insurgencies.
The violence there has driven terrorism-related deaths in Pakistan to their highest point since 2013, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace, a research group. It said Pakistan in 2025 suffered the largest number of casualties from terrorist incidents of any country in the world, with 1,139 people killed.
Islamabad, a city of about a million people, had lately been spared the effects of terrorism. But it suffered two attacks in recent months, including a February suicide bombing at a mosque that killed more than 30 worshipers and injured nearly 170 others. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for it.
Officials are also worried about retaliatory violence from Afghanistan, where the Pakistani military has carried out dozens of airstrikes since late February. Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of supporting a terrorist group that has carried out hundreds of attacks on Pakistani soil in recent years.
As Pakistan was brokering the Middle East cease-fire, some of its officials discreetly met with their Afghan counterparts for talks in China. Both sides said they would continue the talks and refrain from escalating the conflict, according to China.
Euan Ward reported from Beirut, Lebanon, Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer from Tel Aviv, and Aaron Boxerman from Jerusalem.
Israel and Lebanon’s ambassadors to the United States are expected to meet in Washington next week for direct talks, according to three Lebanese officials, one Israeli official and another person familiar with the matter.
The initial round of talks will be largely preparatory, meaning a final settlement to end the war in Lebanon is not expected imminently, according to one of the Lebanese officials and the person briefed on the talks, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
With U.S. and Iranian officials set to meet for peace talks in Pakistan on Saturday, the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors also spoke by phone on Friday in the presence of U.S. officials.
During that call, they agreed to meet in Washington on Tuesday, according to statements from both countries, but the two framed the scope of that first meeting differently.
According to a statement from the office of President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon, the parties agreed to hold their first meeting “next Tuesday at the U.S. State Department to discuss announcing a cease-fire and setting a date for the start of negotiations between Lebanon and Israel under U.S. auspices.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, said in a statement that Israel had “agreed to begin formal peace negotiations this coming Tuesday,” and that it “refused to discuss a cease-fire” with Hezbollah.
Whether Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon, is included in the Iran cease-fire is one of the major disputes rattling the truce.
Israel has intensified its attacks in Lebanon since that deal was reached. Iranian officials have warned that negotiations in Pakistan would not begin without a halt in the fighting there — raising the risk that President Trump’s diplomatic push with Tehran could collapse.
Lebanon and Israel do not maintain diplomatic relations, and their officials have met only intermittently in the past half-century, making the meeting on U.S. soil historic. But it does not amount to high-level peace talks between government ministers. And the talks face enormous hurdles from the outset, in part because the Lebanese government has no direct control over Hezbollah, which has long signaled opposition to direct talks with Israel and resisted disarming.
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Mr. Leiter, and his Lebanese counterpart, Nada Hamadeh Moawad, will lead their countries’ delegations, according to the three Lebanese officials, the Israeli official and the other person familiar with the talks. The U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Michel Issa, will also be present, said one Lebanese official and the person familiar with the matter.
Before the parallel talks in Pakistan, a phone call including Mr. Leiter, Ms. Hamadeh Moawad, Mr. Issa, and Mike Needham, a senior State Department official, was also scheduled for Friday.
The diplomatic movements follow a devastating wave of Israeli airstrikes on Wednesday that killed more than 300 people in Beirut and elsewhere in Lebanon, including the south, where Israeli forces have invaded amid the latest war with Hezbollah. The conflict began after the militant group fired rockets into Israel last month in solidarity with Tehran.
Mr. Aoun, the Lebanese president, called Wednesday’s attack “a new massacre” that added to Israel’s “dark record,” while Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, claimed scores of those killed were militants.
The State Department confirmed on Thursday that it would host a meeting next week with representatives of Israel and Lebanon to discuss cease-fire negotiations, but did not provide details. That followed a statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel that he had ordered his government to start direct talks with Lebanon focused on disarming Hezbollah and establishing peaceful relations.
Mr. Netanyahu said, however, that Israel would continue its attacks against the group.
Michael Crowley and Dayana Iwaza contributed reporting.
Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan
Less than 24 hours before U.S. and Iranian officials are expected to meet here for high-level peace talks, Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, is locked down.
The authorities have blocked roads with shipping containers and barbed wire, deployed security forces across the city, and sealed off a two-mile radius around the Serena Hotel, where parts of the delegations are scheduled to stay. Even the hiking trails on the lush hills overlooking the city have been closed to the public.
Pakistani officials declared Thursday and Friday as public holidays to prepare the capital, a quiet, green and residential city of just over a million residents in a country of 250 million people.
The Pakistani authorities have disclosed almost no details about the talks, including where they will be held, citing security concerns and the need to let Iranian and U.S. officials drive the negotiations.
Still, Pakistan’s government has welcomed its moment in the international diplomatic spotlight. World leaders in Europe and the Middle East have thanked Pakistan for its mediation efforts. Editorials in Pakistani newspapers have heralded a new era for the country as a regional power broker.
The Pakistani foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, even said that Iranian and U.S. journalists covering the talks could travel to Pakistan and obtain a visa on arrival — a highly unusual measure in a country where foreign reporters usually wait weeks or months before obtaining permission to enter.
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