At approximately 8, April 10 -- 00 pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, 7 April 2026, the guns paused. After forty days of US and Israeli strikes on Iranian territory - targeting military infrastructure, energy networks and command systems - a two-week ceasefire came into effect, brokered not by Washington's traditional allies in the Gulf, not by Europe's multilateral institutions, but by Pakistan. President Donald Trump confirmed it on Truth Social. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed it on X., and both men used the same language to describe who made it happen: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir.

For the Arab commentators who had spent weeks demanding that Pakistan abandon its mediating posture and join one ...