# Oman pushes diplomacy as Gulf conflict widens
On the event date, Oman renewed its call for an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East war and said there were still diplomatic paths available to end the fighting. Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi used social media to argue that “off ramps” remained open and should be used before the conflict widened further.
The statement carried particular weight because Oman had been mediating US-Iran talks before the war began. The evidence packet says Omani officials had described peace as “within reach” just hours before the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, which then triggered a regional cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation.
Al-Busaidi did not lay out a specific negotiation plan in his public comments, but he rejected the idea that the only options were military. Instead, he called for an immediate ceasefire and a return to what he described as responsible regional diplomacy. That message was aimed at a moment when the conflict was no longer confined to Iran, Israel and the United States.
Oman itself had become part of the crisis. The packet says two drones struck the Duqm commercial port, one expatriate worker was injured, and a fuel tank at the port was also hit in a later attack. Those incidents showed that even the country most associated with mediation was now exposed to the violence it was trying to defuse.
The wider regional picture only increased the urgency of Oman’s position. The same reporting cycle described strikes in Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Several of those states host US facilities or sit along the maritime routes affected by the war, making spillover attacks both a strategic and economic risk.
The diplomatic split inside Washington also matters to Oman’s argument. The packet says President Donald Trump suggested the US had attacked Iran because he believed it would strike first, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US acted because it knew Israel was about to bomb Iran. Against that backdrop, Oman’s call for calm was also a challenge to the logic of pre-emptive escalation.
For Gulf states, the message was simple: the war was beginning to endanger ports, energy infrastructure and civilian workers far beyond the original battlefield. Oman’s plea that there were still off-ramps available was not just rhetoric. It was a warning that the region still had options, but that those options were narrowing quickly.
