Pakistan delivered Iran's revised two-phase ceasefire proposal to Washington on 28 April 2026. Phase 1 calls for full cessation of hostilities and binding guarantees against renewed attacks on Iran and Lebanon; Phase 2 covers Strait of Hormuz management and security. Nuclear talks are deferred entirely to a post-war Phase 3, a substantive change from the three-phase document Pakistan carried on 27 April which placed nuclear sequencing as a pre-ceasefire condition. Al Jazeera confirmed the text via the Pakistani government channel.
Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, called the offer 'better than we thought' but raised verification concerns. The assessment is the most positive US public signal yet on a ceasefire text, and arrives 24 hours before the War Powers Resolution (WPR) 60-day clock expires. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi ran a three-day shuttle through Islamabad twice, Muscat, and St Petersburg, where he met Vladimir Putin at the Boris Yeltsin Library. Donald Trump rejected the earlier three-phase version on Truth Social; the cancelled Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner Pakistan trip leaves Pakistan as the sole active mediator, displacing Oman's bilateral track that ran the early war.
Deferring nuclear talks to the post-war period is the same procedural move JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) negotiators used in 2013 to break a sequencing impasse: settle the politics first, settle the verification later. The 2013 framework had a P5+1 structure to carry the verification weight; this proposal has Pakistan and one Truth Social rejection. Phase 1's binding guarantees against renewed attacks on Lebanon expand the geographic scope of the ceasefire beyond Iran itself, recognising Hezbollah's operational entanglement with Iranian command. The verification gap Rubio flagged is the procedural lever Washington can use to slow the text without rejecting it, particularly if Senator Lisa Murkowski's AUMF lands on Congress.gov before the deadline and forces the executive into adversarial-text territory.
The revised text now sits at the State Department alongside a 60-day US signing column that has remained empty throughout the conflict.
