PENJWIN, Iraq — The first organized convoys of displaced families began rolling east from Iraqi Kurdistan toward the Iranian border on Friday as the ceasefire between Iran and an Israeli-American coalition entered its third day, with United Nations agencies cautioning that an emerging trickle of voluntary returns risked outpacing the unexploded-ordnance surveys, water-system inspections and medical reconnaissance still needed to make many home villages safely habitable.

A loose column of 14 minibuses and roughly 40 private vehicles, organized by an ad-hoc committee of Iranian Kurdish community leaders at the Baharka transit site outside Erbil, departed at first light and crossed the Bashmaq border post into Marivan, in Iran’s Kordestan province, by midmorning. UN refugee agency staff who had counseled families against an immediate return ultimately accompanied the convoy at the request of organizers, distributing identification cards, water purification tablets and emergency contact numbers along the route.

The agency’s regional representative for the Iran emergency, Catherine Russell, said the early returns had not been encouraged but would not be obstructed. “Our position has not changed: voluntary, informed, dignified, safe — those are the four conditions, and not all four are present yet in every area,” Russell said in a briefing call from Geneva on Friday afternoon. “What we are doing today, with families who have decided they will not wait, is making sure they go with as much information as we can give them and with a way to reach us if they find their village is not what they remember.”

By UN estimates updated Friday, roughly 1.94 million people remain displaced inside Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen as a result of the six-week war, including approximately 870,000 inside Iran itself and a further 290,000 Iranian nationals who crossed into Iraqi Kurdistan during the worst of the strikes in late March. The agency cautioned that fewer than 4 percent of those displaced were expected to return in the first week, but said even that pace would strain the assessment infrastructure that humanitarian partners and the Iranian Red Crescent had managed to assemble during the ceasefire window.

In Penjwin, the last Iraqi town before the frontier, a tea seller named Hewa Karim watched the convoy pass shortly after 9 a.m. and said he recognized at least three families who had stopped in his shop during their flight west six weeks ago. “They came through here in the snow, with nothing,” Karim said. “Today they are going back in spring, and they are still afraid. But they are going back.”

The Iranian Red Crescent, which has taken the lead on the receiving end of the corridor, said it had pre-positioned mobile clinics at four points inside Kordestan and Kermanshah provinces and had requested an additional 60 ambulances from the central government to support what its spokesman, Mostafa Mohammadi, described as “an expected but unpredictable” flow. Mohammadi told state television that the agency had identified 19 villages in Kermanshah where strikes had damaged water mains or electrical substations and where families were being asked, where possible, to delay returns by at least a week.

A senior official with the United Nations Mine Action Service, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss preliminary assessments, said survey teams had so far cleared roughly 140 of an estimated 1,100 priority sites across western Iran, including agricultural land near three strike locations where unexploded submunitions had been found by local residents in the past 48 hours. “The ceasefire creates a temptation, which is the temptation to walk into your own field,” the official said. “We are asking people not to walk into their own field for another two weeks. Some of them will walk anyway. Our job is to get to as many fields as we can before they do.”

In Baharka, where roughly 14,000 people had been sheltering at the height of the displacement, site managers said registration counters had logged 3,200 declarations of intent to return over the past 48 hours, a figure they described as both lower than feared and higher than the assessment pipeline could comfortably absorb. Site coordinator Dilshad Barzani said the camp was working with the Kurdistan regional government to keep a residual footprint open through at least mid-May for families who returned, found their villages unprepared and needed to come back.

“We are telling people: the door does not close behind you,” Barzani said. “If you go and you find your home is not your home, you come back here, and we will receive you again. We will not say you used your chance.”

Aid officials said the most acute concerns lay in southern Lebanon and along the Iraq-Iran border, where damage to civilian infrastructure had been heaviest and where the medical needs of returning populations had been compounded by the partial collapse, during the war, of routine primary care for chronic conditions. Doctors Without Borders said in a Friday statement that it was opening three additional mobile clinics inside Iran in coordination with the Red Crescent and warned that the resumption of dialysis, insulin and cancer treatment for an estimated 14,000 patients who had been cut off during the conflict remained “the single most urgent unaddressed problem” of the post-ceasefire period.

“We have moved from the emergency of the bomb to the emergency of the prescription,” said Dr. Reza Saberi, a nephrologist with the Iranian Society of Nephrology who has been advising the agency on dialysis logistics. “A ceasefire does not restart a dialysis machine in a clinic whose roof is gone. A ceasefire creates the conditions to restart it. The work of restarting it is now.”

The World Food Programme said it had pre-positioned 12,000 metric tons of staples in Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Kermanshah and would begin distribution to returnees along the main corridors on Saturday, with priority given to families with children under five and to elderly returnees identified through Red Crescent registers. The agency’s regional director, Corinne Fleischer, said donor commitments from the Geneva pledging conference last week had so far covered roughly 61 percent of the appeal for the first 90 days of the recovery period.

In southern Lebanon, where the cross-border exchanges with Hezbollah had displaced an estimated 220,000 people, the Lebanese Red Cross said preliminary returns to villages north of the Litani River had begun on Thursday and proceeded “in a careful, cautious way” through Friday. Its head of operations, Georges Kettaneh, said the agency had so far recorded no incidents involving unexploded ordnance but said three villages had been advised not to accept returnees until further surveys were completed.

Inside Iran, state television showed footage Friday evening of the first arrivals reaching Marivan, where local officials had set up a reception tent and where children were photographed disembarking from a minibus while a Red Crescent volunteer handed out small cartons of juice. The broadcaster did not air interviews with the returning families.

UN agencies said a joint assessment mission, including representatives of the refugee agency, the World Health Organization and the Mine Action Service, would deploy to western Iran over the weekend and was expected to issue updated guidance on safe-return corridors by Tuesday. Officials said that guidance would be revised weekly through the end of May, with the pace of formal returns expected to accelerate sharply once village-level assessments were complete.