European Union foreign ministers met in Luxembourg on Thursday to shape the bloc’s role in a Middle East peace it had no hand in brokering, endorsing a package that commits European personnel and funding to ceasefire verification, refugee return planning and a Mediterranean reconstruction conference to be hosted by France in Marseille in early May.

The Foreign Affairs Council, the bloc’s monthly gathering of foreign ministers, had been scheduled to focus on Ukraine and enlargement before the Islamabad ceasefire announcement on April 12 rearranged the agenda. The truce took effect at 00:00 GMT on Wednesday and held through its first thirty-six hours despite a Houthi missile launch toward southern Saudi Arabia early Thursday morning that was intercepted by Saudi air defenses, and a rocket fired from western Iraq toward a U.S. logistics hub that fell in open desert. Both incidents were swiftly condemned by mediators and did not draw retaliation.

The bloc’s high representative for foreign affairs, Kaja Kallas, said in a closing press conference that European foreign ministers had reached “unanimous political agreement” on a four-part contribution to the post-war phase. The package includes the dispatch of a thirty-person arms-control and monitoring team to support United Nations observers at the Strait of Hormuz, a 1.2-billion-euro humanitarian and reconstruction commitment over eighteen months, a refugee-return coordination cell housed jointly by the European External Action Service and the UN refugee agency, and political endorsement of the Marseille conference.

“Europe was a passenger in this war,” Kallas said, echoing language used by French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday. “We have decided in Luxembourg that Europe will not be a passenger in the peace.”

The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, who arrived in Luxembourg directly from a phone call with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, said the arms-control team would deploy to the region by the end of next week and would work under UN Security Council authority once a framework resolution passed in New York. “We are not duplicating the United Nations mission,” Baerbock told reporters. “We are reinforcing it with European expertise on verification, on inspection protocols, on the kind of detailed work that nobody else is offering at this scale on this timeline.”

The Marseille conference, scheduled for May 6 and 7, will bring together foreign ministers, finance officials and reconstruction coordinators from European states, Gulf donors, the African Union and a representative from the Pakistani-Saudi-Egyptian mediation troika that drafted the Islamabad framework. French officials said invitations had been extended to Iranian and Israeli representatives at the level of deputy foreign minister, with attendance unconfirmed in both cases as of Thursday evening. Macron, in a statement issued from Paris, said the conference would focus on “the rebuilding of civilian infrastructure, the dignified return of displaced people and the financial architecture necessary to sustain a peace that took two years of slide into war to reverse.”

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, said Rome would contribute personnel to the verification team and host a side-meeting at Marseille focused on Mediterranean shipping insurance, an issue that has bedeviled Italian and Greek fleet operators since the war drove war-risk premiums to multiples of pre-conflict rates. “Insurance is not a glamorous subject,” Tajani said, “but for Italian shipowners it is the difference between transits and lay-ups.” He said Italy expected war-risk premiums in the Bab el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz to ease “meaningfully but not immediately” once the ceasefire passes its first thirty days.

The refugee piece of the package addresses a question European interior ministers had pressed hardest on throughout the conflict. UN agencies estimate that the Iran war displaced more than 1.4 million people across Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and southern Iran, with a smaller secondary flow into Jordan and Turkey. European officials, eager to forestall onward movement toward the bloc, agreed to fund return-assistance packages, mine-clearance teams and host-country support payments to Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. “The question is not whether displaced people will go home,” said Margaritis Schinas, the European commissioner for migration, in a separate briefing. “The question is whether the conditions exist for them to do so safely. We are putting money behind those conditions.”

A senior EU official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the Luxembourg meeting also produced a quiet decision to suspend a planned tightening of human-rights sanctions on Iran that had been working its way through the Council since February. “There was a sense that this is not the week to add new pressure,” the official said. “The political signal matters. The Council can return to the issue later.”

The bloc’s posture toward Israel emerged more cautiously. Ministers agreed to lift a partial freeze on dual-use export licensing that had been imposed last month, but stopped short of resuming the upgraded political dialogue framework that several member states had suspended in protest at strikes on Iranian civilian infrastructure. “The dialogue will return when the cabinet in Jerusalem demonstrates restraint over the next several weeks,” the Belgian foreign minister, Maxime Prevot, told Belgian state radio after the meeting. “We are watching the strip of Beirut, the cabinet votes, the public language. We will calibrate.”

Outside the Luxembourg conference center, a modest demonstration of perhaps two hundred people called on the bloc to push harder for accountability over civilian casualties on both sides of the war. Police presence was light. A separate gathering of relatives of European nationals released in last week’s preliminary Doha exchange thanked ministers and called for faster processing of remaining cases.

Sandra Karoui, a Brussels-based senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the Luxembourg meeting represented the bloc’s clearest collective response to the war but did not resolve the deeper question of European strategic autonomy. “The EU has agreed on what it can contribute,” Karoui said. “It has not yet agreed on what it wants the region to look like in five years. That conversation is what Marseille has to start, and what no European capital has the political capital to lead alone.”

Kallas told reporters the Council would return to the region at its May meeting in Brussels, and that she expected a formal Security Council resolution endorsing the Islamabad framework to be tabled in New York within ten days. Officials said additional measures, including a possible European contribution to a Hormuz coast-guard capacity-building mission and targeted reconstruction support for the Yemeni port of Hodeidah, would be announced after the Marseille conference produced its declaration.