A two-day international donor conference in Geneva closed Friday with roughly $34 billion in initial pledges toward postwar reconstruction across Iran, Iraq and Yemen, marking the first concrete financial scaffolding for a recovery effort that the United Nations estimates will ultimately cost more than $180 billion.

The pledges, announced jointly by Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis and U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed at the Palais des Nations, were drawn from 41 governments and a dozen multilateral lenders. The European Union committed $9.2 billion, Japan $4.8 billion, the Gulf Cooperation Council jointly $11 billion, and the United States $3.5 billion, with smaller contributions from Canada, Australia, South Korea and most of the G20. The World Bank and the Islamic Development Bank pledged a combined $4 billion in concessional loans.

“The arithmetic of recovery does not match the arithmetic of war, and it never will,” Mohammed told delegates in her closing remarks. “But the figure announced today gives shattered communities something they have not had in weeks: a credible horizon.”

The conference, organized in less than ten days after the April 15 ceasefire took effect, was unusual for its speed and for the depth of unresolved political questions left in its wake. Chief among them is the mechanism by which reconstruction money will reach Iranian entities still under broad U.S. and European sanctions. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, attending in person for the first session before returning to Tehran, insisted that “no reconstruction is possible without the unfreezing of legitimate civilian funds.” U.S. Treasury officials present, including Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo, signaled that humanitarian carve-outs already exist but that broader sanctions relief would require evidence of “sustained, verifiable” Iranian compliance with the ceasefire’s nuclear annex.

A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said Washington’s $3.5 billion pledge was deliberately routed through U.N. agencies and the International Committee of the Red Cross rather than directly to Tehran. “We are funding people, not regimes,” the official said. “The political conversation about sanctions architecture is a separate track, and it has not concluded.”

The conference’s preliminary damage assessment, prepared by a joint U.N.-World Bank team, put physical destruction in Iran at about $94 billion, concentrated in the Bushehr civilian-industrial corridor, oil-export infrastructure on Kharg Island, and residential districts in Tehran, Isfahan and Bandar Abbas that were struck during the six-week air campaign. Iraq’s bill was estimated at $42 billion, much of it tied to damaged refineries, transmission lines and pipeline infrastructure crisscrossed by both Iranian and U.S. strikes. Yemen’s reconstruction needs, including Houthi-controlled areas, were placed at $44 billion, with port and water systems most degraded.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, who co-chaired the second day’s sessions, described the Gulf bloc’s $11 billion contribution as “a regional choice, not a regional concession.” Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha each committed in the range of $3 billion, with Kuwait and Oman adding smaller sums. Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, whose government helped broker the Islamabad framework, pressed European donors for additional contributions to Yemeni port restoration, arguing that Red Sea commerce would not fully normalize without it.

Among private-sector observers, the tone was cautiously constructive. “This is a starter pledge, not a finish line,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst at the Levant Policy Institute. “The headline number is roughly a fifth of what’s eventually needed, but the political signal — that twenty Sunni-led, Western and East Asian governments are willing to write the same check — is what markets and reconstruction firms have been waiting on.”

Logistical questions dominated the corridors. Several European donors privately raised concerns about Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-linked construction conglomerates, which have historically captured a large share of domestic infrastructure contracts. The conference’s final communique committed signatories to a joint procurement-oversight body, to be hosted in Vienna, that will screen prime contractors and require subcontractor disclosure for projects above $25 million.

Israeli officials did not attend, but a Foreign Ministry spokesperson in Jerusalem said the government “takes note” of the pledging effort and would judge it by whether reconstruction “rebuilds civilian life or rebuilds military capacity.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, facing a fragile coalition and a parliamentary inquiry into prewar intelligence failures, has been notably restrained in public commentary since the ceasefire.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, in a video address to the conference, said his government had identified 174 priority projects, with the southern Basra electrical grid and the Baiji refinery topping the list. He thanked Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia for their mediation and pledged transparency mechanisms that would include a parliamentary oversight committee with opposition membership.

Humanitarian groups urged donors to front-load disbursements. “Pledges that arrive in 2027 will not feed a family in Dhamar this summer,” said Jean-Pierre Caradec, regional director for the Norwegian Refugee Council. According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, roughly 3.1 million people remain displaced across the three countries, with another 1.4 million inside Iran living in damaged or unsafe housing.

A second pledging conference is scheduled for September in Riyadh, where organizers said specific project portfolios — including a multibillion-dollar Strait of Hormuz traffic-management upgrade — would be put forward. Officials said additional pledges and a formal sanctions-relief roadmap would be discussed before the autumn meeting.