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A new draft deal to end the war between Iran and the United States and Israel is now on the table in Tehran — and it comes with a clock. Qatari mediators presented Iran with the draft on Sunday, and Tehran is expected to send its response by the end of the week, according to an official briefed on the negotiations who spoke to Reuters. The draft sets a seven-day timeline addressing both Tehran's and Washington's concerns, laying out daily confidence-building steps each side must take, with several countries acting as guarantors. If it holds, the timeline could begin early next week. If it does not, the same reporting warns, the war that the US and Israel launched in February could resume — and both sides have spent the last week signalling they are ready for that too.
What the seven-day timeline is supposed to do
The idea behind a day-by-day timeline is to solve the trust problem that killed the last deal. An earlier mediation effort produced an interim peace agreement in June, but it quickly unravelled — each side accused the other of moving first, or not moving at all. A seven-day schedule of daily, verifiable steps, guaranteed by several countries, is designed to make cheating visible immediately: if one side misses its step on day two, the other side knows on day two, not after a month of drift. Qatar, along with Pakistan, has led the mediation, and the draft was presented at a meeting in Tehran on Sunday. The timing is delicate for another reason: there were concerns ahead of that meeting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, fighting for another term in a general election, could resume attacks on Iran this week. A deal with a start date of early next week is, in that light, also a race against a political calendar.
Why it could still break: threats, cables and the Houthi front
Three pressures hang over the draft. First, the threats have not stopped: on Friday, US President Donald Trump repeated threats to strike Iran again, while Iranian security officials told Reuters that Tehran had drawn up detailed plans to attack Gulf undersea cables if the US and Israel resumed attacks — a threat aimed at the infrastructure the region's economies run on. Second, separate US reporting warned Gulf states of a possible short, intense renewal of the Iran war after the American midterms, and Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan have all sent envoys to Iran in a parallel push to end the war, according to reporting this week. Third, the war has already spilled beyond Iran: in recent weeks Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis have launched repeated attacks against Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude exporter — the subject of our earlier report — and the conflict has disrupted global shipping and oil supplies across the Middle East. Our October 26 post set out the strike planning that preceded this diplomacy; this draft is the diplomatic answer to it, and Tehran's reply by the end of the week is the next decision point. A seven-day timeline is short enough to test quickly — and that is precisely why it could fail quickly too.