With missiles flying in both directions, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral ceremony underway, and President Donald Trump declaring the ceasefire “over,” one question now hangs over the region: will the delegations still arrive in Islamabad on Saturday?

Overnight, the ceasefire that has held, however shakily, since June came under its greatest strain yet. The United States accused Iran of attacking three commercial tankers, including Saudi and Qatari vessels, as they transited the Strait of Hormuz. Washington responded with what U.S. Central Command described as “powerful strikes,” targeting more than eighty sites across Iran, from radar installations to small Revolutionary Guard boats anchored near Bandar Abbas. Iran answered with missile attacks on American facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait, while air raid sirens echoed across the Gulf for the first time in weeks.

Speaking from the NATO summit in Ankara, President Donald Trump declared the ceasefire “over.” Oil markets reacted immediately. Brent crude surged nearly six percent within hours, underscoring how much of the world’s energy supply still depends on a waterway that repeatedly threatens to become the epicenter of a broader conflict.

Yet for all the drama of the past twenty-four hours, the more consequential story may be unfolding far from the battlefield. A new round of technical-level talks remains scheduled for July 11, and despite the latest exchange of strikes, neither side has withdrawn from the process.

Those negotiations are intended to build on the fourteen-page memorandum signed by both countries on June 17, an agreement that established a framework, if not yet a settlement, for ending a war that began on February 28. The document created a sixty-day window to resolve the three most difficult issues still separating Washington and Tehran: Iran’s nuclear programme, the sanctions continuing to constrain its economy, and the billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets held abroad. The upcoming session is also expected to address freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, the very issue that helped trigger this latest escalation.

Keeping that sixty-day timetable intact has never been straightforward. Iran has said it will confirm the size and composition of its delegation only after the days-long funeral ceremonies for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening strikes of the war, have concluded. Even before this week’s escalation, American and Iranian officials were disputing whether an earlier round of indirect negotiations in Doha had produced any meaningful agreement over the release of frozen assets. Getting both delegations back into the same room, let alone persuading them to compromise, was always going to be difficult. Attempting it only hours after another exchange of fire makes the task considerably more daunting.

That the talks are taking place in Islamabad at all speaks to how this conflict has been managed from the outset. It was Pakistan that brokered the original ceasefire in April after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir launched an intensive round of calls to Washington during the final hours before an American deadline to strike Iran expired. Trump later said he agreed to the ceasefire “based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan,” crediting both men with persuading him to hold back. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, was equally explicit, thanking Pakistan for what he described as its tireless efforts to end the war.

That first meeting in Islamabad, the first direct high-level contact between Washington and Tehran since 1979, concluded without an agreement. Pakistani officials nevertheless continued their diplomatic efforts. Munir travelled to Tehran repeatedly in the months that followed, while Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar kept channels open with counterparts in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt. By mid-June, after what Sharif later described to Pakistan’s National Assembly as several moments when the negotiations nearly collapsed, both sides finally accepted a text that was ready to sign.

It is that same diplomatic architecture, painstakingly assembled over months of quiet, unglamorous phone calls rather than a single dramatic breakthrough, that now faces its sternest test on July 11. If the talks proceed and yield even modest progress, the story will be as much about the resilience of that diplomatic framework as it will be about relations between Iran and the United States.

Pakistan’s role as mediator has not gone unchallenged, particularly in Washington. Sharif’s decision to publicly praise Khamenei during the funeral ceremony in Tehran, describing him as “a great scholar and leader,” drew sharp criticism from several Republican senators, who argued that Islamabad’s close ties with Tehran make it an unsuitable intermediary. Pakistani officials have rejected that criticism, insisting the country has maintained a neutral posture that remains acceptable to both sides in the conflict.

For now, mediators in Islamabad and Doha, which has quietly played an important facilitating role throughout the negotiations, are working to preserve the July 11 meeting. Even as he declared the ceasefire dead, Trump added that negotiators could “keep talking if they want.” Whether those talks ultimately succeed may depend less on what unfolds in Washington or Tehran over the coming days than on what can be decided—or simply preserved—inside a conference room in Islamabad.