What happened
Opposition lawmakers staged a protest on the floor of the National Assembly on Monday, 18 May 2026, demanding proper medical care for imprisoned PTI founder and former prime minister Imran Khan, Dawn reported.
As the session, chaired by Deputy Speaker Ghulam Mustafa Shah, got under way, Leader of the Opposition Mehmood Khan Achakzai stood at his seat and said a deadline given to the government had expired without the required medical care being provided. “We had given the government time until Monday to mend its ways in this regard and had announced that we would not be part of the proceedings,” he said, adding that the opposition would also boycott the budget session.
PTI lawmakers gathered around the Speaker’s seat and raised slogans in favour of their leaders. They held a shadow proceeding of the House and designated Achakzai as Speaker, and the protest continued through Question Hour. After the hour ended at about 6:18pm, the PTI members left the chamber; Shahid Khattak and other PTI members then pointed out a lack of quorum, but treasury members outnumbered the required 86 MNAs and the session continued.
The House approved amendments to two laws and was due to meet again on Tuesday morning.
Government position
Responding to a question by MNA Mussarat Rafique, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Dr Tariq Fazal Chaudhary rejected reports of mass deportations of Pakistanis from the United Arab Emirates as “incorrect and false”, calling them “social media creations”. He said no complaint had been received about deportation from any country, specifically the UAE. The government told the House that 9,233 labour-related complaints had been received from Pakistani workers through missions in the Middle East, and that 164,788 Pakistanis had been deported from Gulf countries over the past five years, including 108,029 from Saudi Arabia and 40,497 from the UAE.
Why it matters
The floor protest and the threatened budget-session boycott raise the political temperature as the government prepares its budget, and keep the treatment of the imprisoned former prime minister at the centre of opposition strategy. The government has said Khan is receiving care, but his party disputes that. The issue dates back at least to February, when opposition lawmakers staged a sit-in outside Parliament over Khan’s worsening eyesight and the government said it would shift him to hospital and form a medical board.
What remains uncertain
It was not immediately clear whether the opposition would carry out its budget-session boycott, and the government had not responded publicly to the medical-care demand at the time of publication.
