Iran Sends Fresh Response to US via Pakistan Mediator

Iran transmitted a new response to the United States’ war-ending proposal through Pakistani intermediaries on Monday, Al Jazeera reported, advancing the indirect negotiating channel that Islamabad has maintained throughout the conflict. The transmission came as Tehran publicly declared that its right to nuclear enrichment is not subject to any negotiation, a position that sits in direct conflict with conditions Washington has set for a ceasefire agreement.

Neither Iran nor the United States disclosed the specific contents of the response. Pakistani officials confirmed the transmission without characterizing whether Tehran’s answer moved closer to or further from the US framework.

Pakistan’s Expanding Mediation Role

Pakistan’s involvement as the primary back-channel between Washington and Tehran has deepened over the past week. Pakistani Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi held talks with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran on Sunday, according to Al Jazeera, a meeting that immediately preceded Monday’s formal transmission. The interior minister’s visit underscored the seriousness with which Islamabad is treating the mediation assignment and its direct access to Iran’s executive leadership.

Separately, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf met with Pakistani officials to discuss the stalled US talks. Ghalibaf criticized what he described as the adversarial US role in the negotiations, arguing that Washington’s conditions were designed to humiliate Iran rather than reach a durable agreement. His remarks illustrate the gap between Iran’s public parliamentary framing — in which the US is an obstruction — and the ongoing engagement through Pakistani channels, which presumes some degree of negotiating good faith on both sides.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry has publicly acknowledged the arrangement. A ministry spokesman confirmed that US-Iran talks are ongoing and are being conducted through Pakistan, a rare explicit acknowledgment of the mechanism from Tehran’s diplomatic apparatus.

Iran also expressed formal thanks to Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan for their diplomatic support during the conflict. The gesture signals that Tehran values the regional buffer these states provide and is investing in those relationships as the talks continue.

Pakistan’s earlier role in the Hormuz toll dispute and its diplomatic positioning against both US and Russian pressure helped establish Islamabad as an acceptable channel to both parties. Pakistan shares a long border with Iran and has maintained commercial and energy relationships with Tehran despite international sanctions pressure.

Tehran’s Nuclear Red Line

The transmission arrived against a backdrop of increasingly firm Iranian statements on the nuclear question. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei stated Monday that the country’s right to nuclear enrichment cannot be made a subject of negotiation, framing the issue as a matter of sovereign right rather than a tradeable concession.

The statement puts Tehran’s publicly stated position at direct odds with the five conditions President Trump outlined last week, which included a halt to enrichment activities as a prerequisite for any agreement. The conditions, delivered via intermediaries and public statements, demanded the full cessation of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief and a formal end to hostilities.

The enrichment red line is not new — Iranian officials have maintained versions of it throughout the conflict — but Monday’s explicit public restatement, coinciding with the Pakistani transmission, suggests Tehran is signaling the limits of what any response it has sent could contain. If the answer submitted through Pakistan reflects the enrichment constraint Baghaei described, the US faces an unresolved core disagreement at the center of the negotiating framework.

This enrichment impasse has been a persistent feature of the conflict’s diplomatic track. G7 allies meeting Monday were confronted with the same contradiction: Washington pressing for a coordinated sanctions front while Tehran refuses to treat the nuclear file as open. European members of the G7 have historically been reluctant to adopt unilateral US sanctions architecture, and Iran’s public declaration of an enrichment red line reduces the diplomatic space in which a G7 sanctions package could function as a genuine lever.

The enrichment issue traces to Trump’s annihilation ultimatum in May, in which the administration warned Tehran that a failure to accept terms would result in a military escalation beyond the strikes already conducted.

IRGC Strikes in Iraq

The diplomatic activity on Monday was accompanied by a military development on the ground. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reported that it struck what it described as US-Israeli-backed groups in Iraq that were allegedly attempting to smuggle weapons into Iran. The IRGC did not provide independent verification of the claim or identify the specific targets struck. The report could not be immediately confirmed by outside sources.

If accurate, the operation illustrates how the conflict’s boundaries have extended well beyond the direct US-Iran-Israel triangle into the broader Levant and Mesopotamian theater. The IRGC framed the Iraq strikes as defensive — an interdiction of a weapons pipeline — but the operation in a third country adds a layer of regional complexity to negotiations already strained by competing demands.

Also on Monday, Saudi Arabia intercepted three drones that entered from Iraqi territory. Saudi officials did not attribute the drones to a specific group, and no casualties were reported. The incident added to the pattern of cross-border drone activity that has drawn multiple Gulf states into the conflict’s peripheral dynamics regardless of their official diplomatic postures.

The State of the Channel

The Pakistani mediation channel has now produced at least two formal transmissions — the May 10 response to the US framework and Monday’s follow-on — without either side characterizing publicly whether the exchanges have narrowed the gap between their positions. Iran’s foreign ministry characterization of the talks as “ongoing” is consistent with active diplomatic engagement; it does not indicate progress toward terms.

What Islamabad has achieved is more modest but not trivial: it has kept a formal communication line open between governments that have no direct contact, at a moment when the military track remains live and both sides are publicly hardening their stated conditions. Whether that channel can absorb the gap between Iran’s enrichment red line and Washington’s enrichment requirement is the question that will define whether Monday’s transmission advances toward a resolution or marks another round of parallel positioning.

No response from US officials to Monday’s Iranian transmission was publicly issued as of publication.