Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced he will meet Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei in Iran next week, according to Israeli media reports. The meeting comes amid intensifying regional diplomacy involving Iran, Pakistan, and the United States.
Tonight (Tuesday, 23 June), Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif specified that his planned meeting next week in Tehran will be with Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, according to a report carried by Israeli media and attributed to Sharif by Channel N12. This clarifies an earlier announcement earlier this evening (Tue 19:22 Jerusalem) in which Sharif said he would travel to Tehran to pay respects to the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — Iran's former leader, whose funeral procession is set to begin July 4 — and expressed solidarity with Iran. In that initial statement, Sharif did not name a specific counterpart for the visit.
Earlier tonight (Tue 19:22 Jerusalem), the first dispatch of this thread reported that Sharif claimed he received a personal invitation from Mojtaba Khamenei — the first known instance of a foreign leader publicly stating an invitation from the new Supreme Leader. That claim, reported by analyst Yair Goldblatt, was made before Sharif's own on-record statement specifying the meeting. The desk has tracked this story across two published versions this evening, with source attribution moving from an analyst's report to a direct quotation attributed to Sharif by an Israeli news outlet.
As The Zioneer reported on June 13, U.S. President Donald Trump recently reposted a tweet by Sharif, signaling intensifying U.S. engagement with Pakistan amid negotiations linked to Iran's nuclear program and regional posture. Broader regional diplomacy involving Iran, Pakistan, and the United States has accelerated in recent days, with reports of a Qatari delegation heading to Islamabad and Israeli concerns over being sidelined from an emerging deal (The Zioneer, June 14).
No official statement has been issued by either the Pakistani government or Iranian authorities confirming the meeting's agenda, scope, or the status of Khamenei's injury, which Trump recently described as severe (The Zioneer, June 19). The claim of a personal invitation from Khamenei remains based on a single analyst's report and has not been independently corroborated or denied by Tehran.
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