The foreign ministers of France, Germany and the United Kingdom met Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator in Geneva on Thursday, opening a European side-track to the Islamabad mediation effort that focuses narrowly on verification of Iranian enrichment activity and the safety of inspectors still operating in the country.

The session, held at the French permanent mission near Lake Geneva and lasting more than five hours, was the first time since the war began in early March that the so-called E3 had engaged Tehran face-to-face on the nuclear file. European officials described it as a complement to, not a substitute for, the Pakistani- and Saudi-led framework taking shape in Islamabad, where mediators have spent the past week shuttling a draft set of de-escalation principles between Iranian and Israeli capitals.

“The Islamabad track addresses how the fighting might stop. The Geneva track addresses what verification regime survives the fighting,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot told reporters on the steps of the mission. “Without credible inspection, there is no durable peace. Without a halt to strikes, there are no inspectors. The two tracks reinforce each other.” Barrot was flanked by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who together described the meeting as “serious, technical and difficult.”

Iran was represented by Kazem Gharibabadi, a deputy foreign minister and the country’s longtime liaison to the International Atomic Energy Agency, accompanied by a small technical delegation. Iranian state television, which broadcast Gharibabadi’s arrival but not his departure, called the meeting “an opportunity for Europe to demonstrate independence from Washington’s maximalist posture.” Gharibabadi himself told Iranian reporters that Tehran remained committed to its safeguards obligations but would not accept what he called “intrusive demands beyond the agreed protocol” while Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites continued.

Three Israeli strikes on Iranian centrifuge workshops and uranium conversion facilities since the start of the war have left the IAEA without on-site access to several previously declared locations, according to two diplomats familiar with the agency’s internal assessments. Director General Rafael Grossi, who joined the Geneva session for an opening plenary before withdrawing to allow ministers to speak privately, told the meeting that inspector teams had been pulled from Natanz and Fordow on safety grounds and that surveillance camera footage from at least two facilities had been interrupted. Grossi has been pressing both sides for what he termed “deconfliction arrangements” that would allow inspectors to return without becoming targets themselves.

European officials said the Geneva discussion centered on three concrete questions: whether Iran would permit IAEA verification of any centrifuges or enriched material relocated during the conflict; whether enrichment levels at remaining facilities had crossed the 60 percent threshold set out in earlier understandings; and whether Tehran would entertain a temporary suspension of enrichment activity above 20 percent in exchange for a halt to Israeli strikes on declared nuclear infrastructure. Gharibabadi did not reject the framing of those questions, two European officials said, but offered no commitments and indicated that any answers would have to be cleared with Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Akbar Ahmadian in Tehran.

“This was not a negotiation in the usual sense. It was an exploration of whether a verification arrangement is even imaginable under current conditions,” said Helene Tremblay, a former French ambassador now at the Institut Francais des Relations Internationales. “The Europeans have learned from 2015 and from 2018 that the political envelope matters as much as the technical content. They want to be inside the room when the envelope is being drawn.”

The session unfolded against a backdrop of continuing strikes. Overnight Wednesday, Iranian forces launched a barrage of approximately ninety drones and ballistic missiles toward Israel and U.S. installations in Iraq and the Gulf, the bulk of which were intercepted by layered American, Israeli, Saudi and Emirati defenses. Two U.S. service members were killed and seven wounded in a missile impact on a logistics yard at Ain al-Asad Air Base in western Iraq, U.S. Central Command said in a statement, bringing the American death toll since the war began to approximately 320. Israeli aircraft struck what the military described as a missile assembly facility near Isfahan and a Revolutionary Guard command node outside Kermanshah. Houthi forces in Yemen claimed responsibility for a fresh drone attack on a Saudi oil terminal at Yanbu, which Saudi authorities said had been intercepted without damage.

European leverage in Tehran has been narrowed by Washington’s posture. The Trump administration, while not blocking the E3 initiative, has declined to attach the United States to it. A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the administration was “watching with interest” but would not endorse any verification framework that did not include “permanent dismantlement” of Iran’s enrichment capability. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, asked about the Geneva meeting during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Thursday, said only that he “wished our European friends success” while reminding the panel that “the president’s policy has not changed.”

Inside the E3 group, officials privately acknowledged limits to what Geneva could accomplish without American buy-in. The 2015 nuclear deal collapsed in part because European banks and corporations were unwilling to defy U.S. secondary sanctions, and any new verification arrangement would face the same structural problem if it required economic incentives to underwrite Iranian compliance. “We are not pretending we can deliver sanctions relief on our own. We can deliver a verification architecture, and we can deliver a political guarantee, and we can keep a door open,” one British official said. “Whether that is enough for Tehran is what we came here to find out.”

Israeli officials, briefed on the Geneva session through European diplomatic channels, reacted coolly. A statement from the prime minister’s office said Israel “respects the diligence of our European partners” but added that “verification on paper has never been a substitute for the verifiable removal of the threat.” Officials in Jerusalem indicated they would not consider any halt to strikes on nuclear facilities absent a binding commitment by Tehran to suspend enrichment at all declared and undeclared sites.

The Geneva meeting concluded without a joint statement, an outcome European officials called deliberate. A second session has been tentatively scheduled for next week, possibly in Vienna or back in Geneva, with technical experts from the IAEA expected to attend. Barrot, Baerbock and Lammy were expected to brief their counterparts in Islamabad by telephone on Friday morning and to coordinate with Egyptian and Omani mediators on how the European and South Asian tracks might converge if conditions on the ground permitted. Officials said further consultations with non-European partners would be announced in the coming days.