Türkiye’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan held a phone call with his Pakistani counterpart Muhammad Ishaq Dar to discuss diplomatic efforts to end the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, Turkish Foreign Ministry sources said Tuesday.
No further information was released about the call that came hours after Pakistan made a last-minute proposal to avert catastrophic U.S. attacks on Iran, hours ahead of a deadline set by President Donald Trump who warned a "whole civilization will die tonight".
The White House said it was aware and would respond to the proposal by Pakistan, which has sought to mediate after more than five weeks of U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran.
"Diplomatic efforts for peaceful settlement of the ongoing war in the Middle East are progressing steadily, strongly and powerfully with the potential to lead to substantive results in near future," Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif wrote on X.
He appealed directly to Trump to extend his deadline set for 8:00 PM Washington time (midnight GMT) by two weeks.
In turn, he asked Iran to commit for two weeks to fulfilling Trump's key demand -- reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the vital gateway for global oil which Tehran closed in retaliation for the war.
The latest threats from Trump, shocking even by his own provocative standards, brought disbelief and warnings that he was encouraging genocide -- potentially one day leading to war crimes charges against US servicemembers who comply.
"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
The rhetoric was an escalation from a profanity-laden post two days earlier, on Easter Sunday, in which Trump threatened to destroy all bridges and power plants in the country of 90 million -- a war crime unless proven that the sites are mostly for military use.
Pope Leo XIV said that "this threat against all the people of Iran" was "truly unacceptable".
