A Pakistani government official said negotiations are still ongoing with the aim of reopening the Strait of Hormuz and ending the war, MS Now reports

A Pakistani government official said negotiations are still ongoing with the aim of reopening the Strait of Hormuz and ending the war, MS Now reports.

Third-party intermediation by a regional state in a Gulf maritime dispute follows a familiar pattern: smaller or non-belligerent governments have often served as back-channel hosts or messengers between parties unwilling to engage directly, and Pakistan sits in the established peer set of states with ties on both sides. Talks explicitly framed around both reopening the strait and ending the war signal a sequencing question that has mattered in comparable episodes: whether the waterway reopens as a precondition or as part of a broader ceasefire package, since the former has tended to normalise crude flows and freight and war-risk insurance premiums faster than a partial or fragile truce. The distinction worth drawing is between the strait being physically blocked, which removes barrels outright, and elevated risk pricing without closure, where the transmission runs through tanker rates and insurance rather than supply volume. Statements attributed to a single official via secondary reporting carry limited weight on their own; precedent suggests the credible tells are confirmation from the belligerents themselves, actual tanker movements resuming, and insurance underwriters repricing. Until corroboration, episodes of this kind have tended to produce headline-driven retracements in crude that fade without operational follow-through.