DOHA — Mediators closed the opening round of the Doha framework talks on Monday with a chairs’ statement that committed Iran to reinstall International Atomic Energy Agency cameras at two declared nuclear sites within 30 days and set a verification calendar running through August, the most detailed compliance schedule produced since the April 15 ceasefire ended seven weeks of regional war.

The five-page statement, issued jointly by Qatar, Pakistan and Egypt and circulated to participating delegations shortly before 4 p.m. local time, stopped short of the “verifiable, intrusive, and continuous” inspections regime Saudi negotiators had demanded on Saturday. But it established what Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani called “the architecture, the dates and the consequences” of a phased monitoring track, with deliverables tied to specific months and to a parallel review of secondary sanctions.

Under the calendar, IAEA cameras disconnected before the war at the Natanz pilot fuel enrichment plant and at a research reactor outside Tehran are to be reinstalled by June 3 under Iranian and agency supervision. A wider technical mission led by IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi will visit Iran in the second week of June to map damage to declared sites struck by Israel in March, with a confidential preliminary report due to the contact group by July 10. A second framework session, focused on missile and drone restraint, will convene in Muscat from May 26 to 28.

“This is a calendar, not a treaty, and we are not pretending otherwise,” Sheikh Mohammed told reporters in a brief appearance with his Pakistani and Egyptian co-chairs. “But for the first time since the war, every capital in this room has agreed on what the next ninety days look like.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who had arrived in Doha on Friday under domestic pressure to extract reciprocal concessions, accepted the statement at a closing plenary but used his speaking slot to register what he called “formal Iranian reservations” about the absence of any reference to undeclared Israeli facilities. In remarks delivered in Persian and translated by his ministry, Araghchi said Tehran had agreed to the monitoring calendar “as a gesture of seriousness, not of submission,” and warned that future rounds would have to address what he termed the “structural asymmetry” of regional inspections.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, asked at a separate stakeout whether the chairs’ statement met the threshold his delegation had set on Saturday, was carefully measured. “It is a beginning that does not yet match the danger we lived through,” he said. “But beginnings are how durable arrangements are built. We will judge Tehran by what cameras see in June, not by what is said in May.”

The most consequential element of the statement, according to four diplomats briefed on the negotiations, may be a paragraph linking compliance milestones to a U.S.-led review of secondary sanctions on Iranian petrochemical exports. The paragraph, drafted late Sunday after a six-hour bilateral between Deputy Secretary of State Martin Voorhees and Araghchi, commits Washington to publish a list of sanctions “categories under review” by July 1, provided the June IAEA mission proceeds without obstruction. The statement does not commit the United States to lift any specific designation, and a senior State Department official cautioned that the review would be conducted “category by category, with no presumptions.”

Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst at the Levant Policy Forum, said the sequencing represented a meaningful shift. “Three weeks ago, the U.S. position was that sanctions architecture was not a topic for Doha. Today, sanctions are on a calendar that runs alongside the cameras,” she said. “That is the kind of choreography that can either build trust or collapse loudly, and we will know which by July.”

European Union foreign policy chief Marta Stenberg, who had pressed for the inclusion of a humanitarian-sanctions carve-out, told reporters the bloc would coordinate its own banking review with the U.S. timetable. She said EU technical teams would arrive in Tehran on May 18 to begin damage assessments tied to the 420 million euros pledged at the Muscat contact group meeting on April 30.

Israel, which is not party to the Doha talks but maintained a technical liaison in Qatar throughout the round, issued a brief statement from the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem describing the chairs’ document as “a useful intermediate step that must be measured by enforcement, not by ceremony.” A spokesperson for Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said Israel would coordinate closely with the IAEA on the June mission and reserved the right to raise objections to specific Iranian declarations.

The Doha round was not without friction. A planned signing photograph was scrapped Sunday evening after Iranian and Saudi delegations disagreed over the seating order; the chairs’ statement was instead released as a written document with no group image. A Yemeni diaspora protest outside the conference hotel briefly grew to several hundred participants on Monday afternoon, prompting Qatari police to widen a security perimeter. Inside the negotiating rooms, two delegates said tempers flared during a Sunday working group on missile transfers, with the Egyptian chair calling a recess to allow Iranian and Emirati envoys to consult their capitals.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, who has emerged as the framework’s most active operational mediator, said preparations for the Muscat round were already underway and that a technical team from Islamabad would travel to Tehran on May 12 to brief Iranian officials on draft language for the missile basket. He said the chairs would also begin consultations with Russia and China, both of which have pursued bilateral tracks with Tehran and were not represented in Doha.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres welcomed the statement in a written release from New York, calling it “a credible step toward verifiable restraint” and offering UN support for the June IAEA mission. The Security Council, which adopted a resolution endorsing the Islamabad framework on April 26 with Russian and Chinese abstentions, is expected to receive a closed-door briefing from Grossi later this month.

Diplomats leaving the conference hotel Monday evening offered cautious assessments. A senior Pakistani official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the round had produced “less than Riyadh hoped, more than Tehran feared, and exactly what the mediators thought possible.” Officials said the chairs would publish a more detailed technical annex in the coming days and that an interim review of progress against the June milestones would be conducted at the Brussels reconstruction contact group on May 28.