Iran hands its reply to the US 14-point proposal to Pakistan: what Tehran's text reportedly asks for and what comes next

On Sunday, May 10, 2026, Iran's official news agency IRNA confirmed that Tehran had transferred its written response to the latest United States peace proposal through Pakistan, the country acting as the official mediator since the war began. State outlets including CGTN and Xinhua carried the IRNA wording, while Al Jazeera added a Pakistani diplomatic source confirming receipt of the text and saying Islamabad is now pushing Iran toward a middle ground. The handover lands in a sharply deteriorating week for the April 8 ceasefire: drones hit Gulf targets on Sunday and US-Iran fire was exchanged in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday and Friday, with both governments still publicly resisting the language of collapse.

What IRNA confirmed today

The IRNA bulletin, datelined Tehran on May 10, said two operative things. First, that the Iranian response was sent on Sunday to the Pakistani mediator, who in turn relayed it to the US side. Second, that the proposed first stage of the negotiations will focus on ending the war in the region—a deliberately broad phrasing that, as Le Monde's English service noted citing state broadcaster IRIB, also extends explicitly to Lebanon, where Israel's war with Iran-backed Hezbollah has continued in parallel. Tehran also wants the first stage to lock in maritime security in the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

Both Iranian and Pakistani officials have so far refused to publish the text. Al Jazeera's Islamabad correspondent, Kamal Hyder, said Pakistan confirmed receipt and characterised the talks as sensitive diplomacy, with details intentionally kept off the record. That is consistent with how the consultative phase of nuclear-adjacent dossiers is usually run: text leaks tend to harden public positions on either side and reduce, not expand, the negotiator's room for compromise.

What Tehran's reply reportedly asks for

Across IRNA, IRIB and Pakistani diplomatic sourcing routed through Al Jazeera Arabic, three Iranian asks come through clearly. The first is an end to hostilities before any structural concessions—Tehran wants the active fighting frozen as the price of moving to substance, not as a reward for it. The second is an enforceable maritime security framework covering the Strait of Hormuz and the wider Persian Gulf, which Iranian negotiators have repeatedly tied to control over transit fees, naval escort norms, and rules of engagement for foreign warships in territorial waters.

The third, surfaced via IRIB and reflected in Le Monde's account, is regional scope: Tehran is reading Lebanon explicitly into the first stage, in effect trying to extend any pause beyond a US-Iran bilateral and into a regional ceasefire that constrains Israeli operations as well. Abbas Aslani, a senior research fellow at the Center for Middle East Strategic Studies, told Al Jazeera the document is best read not as a yes or no but as a clarification of Iranian views on the US text, leaving room for stage-by-stage concessions.

What Washington's 14-point text demands

The US proposal sent to Tehran earlier in the week is described by Al Jazeera and other regional outlets as a 14-point memo. On the Iranian side, the demands are stiff: a binding undertaking not to develop a nuclear weapon, a halt on all uranium enrichment for at least 12 years, and the surrender of an estimated 440 kg (about 970 lb) of uranium already enriched to 60 percent—a stockpile that is technically several short steps from weapons-grade material. In effect, Washington is asking for the entire pre-war enrichment programme to be parked under verifiable freeze for more than a decade.

On the US side, the offered reciprocity is built around removing economic and physical chokeholds. Sanctions would be lifted gradually, billions in frozen Iranian assets would be released, and the naval blockade of Iranian ports—imposed on April 13 after fighting reignited—would be halted in step with Iran's compliance. The package is, in short, the most ambitious arms-control swap put in front of Tehran in years, but it relies on Iran accepting a structural ceiling rather than a pause.

Pakistan's role and the wider mediator pool

Pakistan has been the lead intermediary since the conflict began, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif held talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Islamabad on April 25 to keep the channel alive even after the planned second round of direct talks did not materialise. The first round of talks, hosted in Islamabad in April, ran for around 21 hours without a breakthrough. Pakistan's leverage flows from a long shared border with Iran, deep dependence on stable Gulf energy flows, and a working line into the Trump administration that few other capitals can match in this configuration.

Around Islamabad, a wider mediator pool is now active. Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani met JD Vance at the White House on Friday, May 8, then detoured to Miami on Saturday to meet Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House envoy Steve Witkoff on the same memorandum—a sequence Newsorga has covered separately. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and China are all reported to be in close contact with Iranian officials, with President Donald Trump due to visit China—one of the largest importers of Iranian crude—roughly a week from now, raising the political weight of any Tehran message Beijing chooses to reinforce.

Tehran's parallel public posture

While the diplomatic note moved through Islamabad, Iran's public messaging stayed defiant. President Masoud Pezeshkian wrote on X on Sunday that we will never bow down to the enemy, and if there is talk of dialogue or negotiation, it does not mean surrender or retreat. Iran's military chief Ali Abdollahi, according to state television, met Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and received new directives and guidance for the continuation of operations to confront the enemy, language the Iranian system uses to telegraph that the armed forces remain on a war footing even while the foreign ministry talks.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, parliamentary speaker and lead negotiator in earlier ceasefire talks, separately said on Thursday that a full ceasefire could only function once the US naval blockade is lifted. That sequencing—blockade off first, then enrichment freeze—is the mirror image of Washington's preferred order of operations and is now likely the central friction point inside Tehran's reply.

The pressure clock around the handover

Each side is operating against a different stopwatch. The US clock is shaped by the blockade itself: Trump has publicly argued Iran is collapsing financially, losing millions of dollars a day with ports closed since April 13, while internal assessments cited in regional press suggest Washington thinks roughly four more months of pressure could force terms. Iran's clock is shaped by domestic energy stress, an inflation surge, and the political cost of being seen to negotiate under duress—balanced against analyst views that Tehran has the economic and political will to endure a long siege if Washington overplays its hand.

Pakistan's clock is the most immediate. Hyder, on Al Jazeera, said the blockade's spillover is critical for the Pakistani economy: fuel prices are sky-high, electricity-load shortages are biting, and Islamabad has both political incentive and bandwidth to push aggressively for a breakthrough. The next few days, in his telling, will hinge on how favourably the US responds to whatever the Iranian response is—a sentence that captures the entire status of the file at the moment of the handover.

Where the impasse most likely lives

If the talks collapse in the next round, the fault line is unlikely to be the headline question of war or peace. It is much more likely to lie in the technical annex around enrichment. Aslani's reading—that any deal becomes impossible if the US insists on exporting Iran's highly enriched uranium and on a long suspension of enrichment—maps onto a recurring red line in Iranian nuclear politics: domestic enrichment is treated as a sovereignty marker, not as a bargaining chip.

The second probable impasse is on sequencing. Iran wants the blockade lifted as a precondition for substantive concessions; the US wants verifiable nuclear steps before serious sanctions and blockade relief. The 14-point memo's value is that it tries to interleave the two clocks across stages—but the unresolved question is who acts first inside each stage and how a stalled step is unwound without a return to live fire in the strait.

What to watch in the next 72 hours

Three concrete signals will tell readers whether the handover translates into momentum. First, whether Washington publicly acknowledges receipt of the Iranian text and signals whether it treats the reply as engagement or rejection—the State Department's usual move at this stage is a single carefully worded line. Second, whether Hormuz sees a meaningful drop in tit-for-tat strikes against US warships and Iranian tankers, and whether war-risk insurance premiums begin to ease for Gulf transits. Third, whether Pakistan, Qatar or another mediator follows the handover with a dated invitation for a second round of talks at a specific venue—Islamabad, Doha, Muscat or Geneva would each carry a different political signal.

Markets will read tanker movements, CENTCOM advisories, and any Iranian parliamentary commentary—Ghalibaf in particular—as leading indicators. A deal is unlikely to be signed in days, but the texture of these next few rounds will determine whether the April 8 ceasefire holds as a frozen baseline or unravels into a second phase of open conflict.

Bottom line

Iran's confirmed handover of a written reply to Washington's 14-point proposal through Pakistan is the first concrete piece of diplomatic paper to move since the truce came under strain. Tehran is asking for an end to fighting—including in Lebanon—and a hard maritime-security framework before structural nuclear concessions; Washington is asking for an enrichment freeze and a 60-percent uranium handover before fully reopening Iran's ports. The two positions are still far apart, and Pakistani officials are now actively pushing Iran toward a middle ground while a wider mediator pool of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and China watches for Washington's response. The next sentence in this file will not come from a press conference—it will come from how the Trump administration replies, and from whether the strait stays quiet long enough for that reply to be heard.