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If there is one thing Pakistanis refuse to do — even during a geopolitical crisis — it is panic.

Over the past few days, nearly 1,000 Pakistani nationals have crossed back into the country from Iran through the Taftan and Gabd-Rimdan border crossings, according to officials, after tensions sharply escalated following the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in joint US-Israeli air strikes.

Around 440 Pakistanis returned on Tuesday alone, including students, diplomats, businessmen, pilgrims and tourists. Immigration officials said border posts were operating round the clock to facilitate the returning nationals.

The evacuations come as the conflict continues to intensify across the region. The strikes that killed Khamenei triggered a rapidly expanding war between Iran, the United States and Israel, with hundreds of targets hit across Iran and casualties climbing into the hundreds.

In other words: it is a very serious situation.

Which is perhaps why the internet could not quite process what one Pakistani evacuee told Reuters.

“We were out on the streets enjoying the atmosphere,” the man said, describing the scene in Tehran. “We were enjoying the explosions but they made us leave.”

The “they” in question was the Pakistani embassy staff who were evacuating nationals for obvious reasons.

The internet, however, immediately lost the plot.

One X user had a valid question. “What is wrong with Pakistanis?” — we wish we had an answer to that.

Another summed up the national vibe with mild concern.

Others took the moment as proof of Pakistan’s strange global brand.

For many, though, the quote simply felt painfully accurate.

Like us, many users weren’t sure if they should laugh or worry about the borderline morbid nonchalance at display.

A lot of users took this as another sign of Pakistanis being “built different”.

A user highlighted that “only Pakistanis could turn a missile alert into street commentary like it’s a cricket match”.

Some users even took it as a sign of Pakistanis’ bravery.

If you grew up here, the reaction is not entirely surprising.

Pakistanis have long had a cultural habit of responding to crisis with humour, deadpan commentary and a refusal to behave in the appropriately terrified way international observers expect. We saw a demonstration of this during last year’s Pakistan-India conflict. It is the same energy that turns power outages into rooftop chai sessions and political turmoil into meme cycles.

But jokes aside, the situation across the Middle East remains volatile.

The killing of Khamenei — confirmed by Iranian authorities after the strikes — has marked one of the most dramatic escalations in decades of tension between Iran, Israel and the United States.

Since then, waves of air strikes and retaliatory attacks have continued, with military and civilian targets hit across Iran and the wider region bracing for further escalation, which makes the Reuters clip both funny and slightly unsettling.

Because while the rest of the world is watching the conflict with alarm, somewhere in the middle of it all, a Pakistani man looked at incoming explosions and thought: “Nice atmosphere.”