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US-Iran truce strains amid Lebanon strikes

Arti Bali New Delhi, April 9 (UNI) A fragile two-week ceasefire between the United States, Israel and Iran was jeopardised on Wednesday, less than a day after it took effect, as continued Israeli strikes in Lebanon raised immediate questions about whether the truce could hold. The breakdown in confidence stemmed from sharply conflicting accounts of what was actually agreed. Tehran accused Israel of violating the terms, but Israel denied that Lebanon was ever part of the agreement. The accusations and denials have now cast doubt on Pakistan's role as mediator, as speculations are rife that whether different versions of the ceasefire framework have been shared to US-Israel and Iran. Washington maintained that the truce applies exclusively to Iran and does not extend to other theatres of conflict. Pakistan, however, publicly announced a broader ceasefire that included Lebanon and other conflict zones, a position echoed by signals from Tehran. The divergence of contents of the agreement raised the possibility that competing drafts were circulated to the two sides, producing incompatible interpretations of what was agreed upon. The confusion was compounded when Iran published a ten-point ceasefire plan on social media, that explicitly mentioned Lebanon. The United States did not share its version of the agreement with the media, but the contested clauses were evident in Iran's public document. The absence of a single, clearly defined framework has created dangerous uncertainty at precisely the moment when diplomacy was expected to stabilise the region. Pakistan'srole as a peace broker had been driven by its own ambitions. Islamabad sought to position itself as a credible global peace broker on the conflict most visibly disrupting world energy supplies and economic stability. As President Trump's 8 p.m. deadline for Iran approached, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif took to social media in a last-ditch effort to engineer an off-ramp for both sides. In a post on X on Tuesday afternoon, Pakistan PM Sharif declared that diplomacy was progressing strongly and called on Trump to extend the deadline by two weeks, tagging the president and his senior advisers directly. At the heart of the dispute lies the question of Lebanon. Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz following the ceasefire announcement by President Trump, but caution is there over the artery as Israel continued to strike multiple cities in Lebanon in pursuit of Hezbollah. Iran has been insisting that Lebanon's inclusion was a core element of the ten points it conveyed to Washington. The United States and Israel maintain they agreed to no such provision. The dispute has now fractured the diplomatic process before negotiations have even begun. Iran's parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who was expected to lead the upcoming talks with the United States in Islamabad, declared that a ceasefire and negotiations had become "unreasonable" given the circumstances. In a post on X, Ghalibaf cited three violations of Tehran's ten-point framework: the continued strikes in Lebanon, in breach of the clause calling for an immediate ceasefire across all regions; the entry of an Israeli drone into Iranian airspace, shot down over the city of Lar in Fars Province; and the denial of Iran's right to uranium enrichment, enshrined in the sixth clause of the framework. He noted that President Trump had himself acknowledged the ten-point plan as a "workable basis on which to negotiate", making the violations, in Tehran's view, all the more egregious. Further signs of internal friction within Iran emerged on Thursday, when the Iranian Ambassador to Pakistan, Reza Amiri Moghadam, deleted a social media post announcing that an Iranian delegation would arrive in Islamabad that evening for talks with the United States. The ambassador had noted the visit was proceeding "despite scepticism of Iranian public opinion due to repeated ceasefire violations by the Israeli regime." The deletion fuelled speculation about divisions within Tehran over whether to proceed with negotiations at all. With Hormuz hanging in the balance, an Iranian delegation's visit to Pakistan is in limbo and the ceasefire's foundational terms openly disputed, the window for salvaging the agreement is narrowing fast. UNI AAB AKU

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