ISLAMABAD/TEHRAN:
Pakistan on Friday expressed growing optimism over an elusive deal, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif saying the final text of a US-Iran peace deal had been agreed.
“We can confirm that an agreed final text of the peace agreement has been reached and Pakistan is now working closely with both sides to finalize the next steps,” the prime minister posted on X.
He tagged the presidents of the United States and Iran and other leaders of both countries. Pakistan has been mediating between the two sides for months.
“Peace has never been closer than it is now,” Sharif said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi insisted he had never been closer to reaching a deal with the United States to end the war in the Middle East, after US President Donald Trump angrily accused Tehran of negotiating in bad faith.
“Amid Pakistan’s intensive mediation efforts, we are fully aware of the relentless disinformation campaign waged by those who want to sabotage the peace agreement,” the prime minister added.
Publicly, however, the negotiating positions of the warring parties remain far apart, with Iranian state media publishing a breakdown of what was supposedly on the table that stood in stark contrast to Washington’s long-standing red lines.
During weeks of stalled negotiations, marked by threats and exchanges of gunfire despite an April truce, US President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that a deal was almost signed, only for talks to drag on.
The president had repeated that claim on Thursday, but on Friday he lashed out at Tehran, accusing it of negotiating in bad faith following Iranian media reports.
In a social media post, Trump dismissed the Iranian accounts as having “NOTHING to do with the terms agreed upon in writing.”
“It’s very dishonorable to deal with people,” he continued. “You better get your act together and FAST!”
But Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi appeared to play down the dispute.
“The Islamabad MoU has never been closer,” he wrote in a social media post, referring to the Pakistani capital that hosted previous talks between the United States and Iran.
“Pending its completion, the media should refrain from speculating about its content,” he added.
Trump later posted a screenshot of Araghchi’s message on his own feed.
Disputing Trump’s accusation of “bad faith,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said an agreement had been reached with Washington “on most points.”
He added that a meeting was also being held in Iran to finalize a consensus.
“We are in the final stages of reaching a conclusion,” he said.
A senior US official also expressed optimism that the parties would “sign this agreement in the coming days.”
“If I had given them confidence that we were going to sign this deal, maybe I would have said 75 percent this morning, probably now it’s more like 80 to 85 percent, but it’s not 100 percent,” the official told reporters in a call.
The Swiss Foreign Ministry said on Friday that it had been in contact with both the United States and Iran and had “proposed Switzerland as a venue for a possible signing, should the parties agree.”
US ally Israel has said Trump had promised it that any deal would strip Iran of its enriched nuclear material, but Tehran’s official IRNA news agency said this was not even on the table.
According to IRNA, after the signing of an initial agreement, Iran and the US will hold 60 more days of talks and “Iran’s right to enrich uranium and the retention of enriched material… will be emphasized with a view to its inclusion in the final agreement.”
Beyond this, according to IRNA, Iran would insist on managing traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the key maritime trade route transporting oil and gas from the Gulf, which Tehran has blocked since the outbreak of war.
On Friday, Iran’s Mehr news agency, citing a source close to the country’s negotiating team, said the deal would also see the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets.
But those details clashed with a summary offered by a senior White House official, who told AFP that Iran had agreed to dismantle its nuclear program, destroy its stockpile of enriched uranium and reopen the Strait, and that Tehran would not see any of its frozen funds returned until it had fulfilled these commitments.
US Vice President JD Vance also said that Iran was “not receiving cash and no funds were being released simply to sign an agreement or attend a meeting.”
But, he added, if “Iran meets its obligations, then economic benefits will flow to it and to the entire region.”
In Tehran, some ordinary Iranians feared that a deal would consolidate the authorities’ rule.
“I’m not sure how I feel,” a 29-year-old cafe worker, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, told AFP.
“The main goal of this war was for the United States to eliminate the system and this did not happen. So what does an agreement mean?”
