Pakistan PM’s X Post Laying Groundwork for Ceasefire Shows Extremely Odd Edit Suggesting It Was Written For Him

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s social media post that laid the groundwork for Tuesday’s two-week pause of U.S. attacks on Iran contained an odd edit, suggesting the announcement was written for him by people outside of the Pakistani government.

President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday night that he had agreed to a request from Pakistan to extend his Iran deadline by two weeks, claiming he would pause attacks on the country during that period. The president had previously threatened to bomb civilian targets in Iran, claiming that “a whole civilization will die,” if a deal with Iran was not reached by 8 p.m. on Tuesday.

“Based on conversations with [Pakistan] Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks,” Trump wrote.

Sharif publicly announced his request for a two-week extension a few hours earlier, writing in a post on X that he was urging Trump to “allow diplomacy to run its course”:

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. To allow diplomacy to run its course, I earnestly request President Trump to extend the deadline for two weeks. Pakistan, in all sincerity, requests the Iranian brothers to open Strait of Hormuz for a corresponding period of two weeks as a goodwill gesture. We also urge all warring parties to observe a ceasefire everywhere for two weeks to allow diplomacy to achieve conclusive termination of war, in the interest of long-term peace and stability in the region.

But this version of the announcement was not the full text of the post originally posted to X. As seen in the post’s publicly visible edit history, the original text began with the phrase “*Draft – Pakistan’s PM Message on X*.”

This original version of the announcement was posted at 3:16 p.m. ET before it was quickly edited to exclude the first line and reposted within a minute. The edited line implies that the post may have been directly copied from elsewhere, while the reference to Sharif as “Pakistan’s PM” seems to further allude to a source outside of the prime minister’s government, who would likely refer to him simply as “the prime minister.”

Oddly, a second edit was made on the post a minute later, changing the order of the negotiating parties who were tagged below the announcement. After Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s X handles, both of the first two posts list Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East. However, in the final edit of the post, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s handle is moved above Witkoff’s.

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