Foreign ministers from the six Gulf Cooperation Council states convened in Doha on Monday to begin shaping a post-war security architecture for the region, two days after a prisoner exchange in the Qatari capital closed out the most fraught chapter of the five-week Iran-Israel conflict.

The closed-door session, hosted by Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, drew the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman. Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey participated as observers in their capacity as mediators of the Islamabad framework that produced the April 12 ceasefire. A U.S. delegation led by Deputy Secretary of State Brian Whitford attended portions of the meeting but did not sit at the table for what one official described as “the in-region conversation.”

The talks, scheduled to run through Wednesday, are intended to translate the joint statement issued from Islamabad eight days ago into a set of working understandings on three issues that have repeatedly threatened to unravel the truce: freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, the status of nonstate armed groups that fired on shipping and Gulf territory during the war, and a process for managing Iran’s remaining nuclear infrastructure.

“The ceasefire bought us time. It did not buy us peace,” Sheikh Mohammed said in brief remarks before the closed session. “What is required now is patient, technical work. There is no other path.”

Iran was not represented at the table, but Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Ravanchi met separately with Omani Foreign Minister Badr Al-Busaidi in Muscat on Sunday, and a readout from the Omani foreign ministry said Tehran had been “fully briefed” on the Doha agenda and had raised “no objections in principle.” Omani diplomats have for years served as the back channel between Tehran and the Arab Gulf, and Muscat’s reprise of that role this week has been quietly welcomed by Washington.

Diplomats said the Doha discussions opened with the maritime question, the most operationally urgent of the three. Roughly twenty percent of the world’s seaborne oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz, and a United Nations observer mission deployed there last week under the terms of the ceasefire has only a six-week mandate. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have pushed for a longer-term arrangement, modeled loosely on the Multinational Force and Observers that has monitored the Sinai since 1982, that would include Gulf navies alongside UN observers and a small European contingent.

“There is appetite in the room for something more durable than a six-week observer mission, but no one wants a NATO-style structure that Tehran would read as encirclement,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst who has briefed several of the participating delegations. “The challenge is finding a formula that gives Iran enough face-saving to sign on without giving it a veto.”

The second agenda item, the future of Iran-aligned armed groups, is expected to prove the hardest. The Houthi movement in Yemen, which launched dozens of missiles and drones at U.S. naval assets and Gulf infrastructure during the war, was not party to the Islamabad framework and has not formally accepted the ceasefire, though it has held its fire since April 16 aside from one launch that Saudi defenses intercepted. Hezbollah, similarly, has been quiet but uncommitted. Saudi officials have argued privately that no regional arrangement will hold unless Tehran uses its influence to bring both into compliance; Iranian officials have countered that the groups are independent actors whose grievances must be addressed on their own terms.

A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the U.S. position is that the Doha talks should “lock in the maritime piece first and not let the harder questions hold the easier ones hostage.” The official added that the Trump administration is “comfortable letting the Gulf states lead this phase,” a notable shift from the more directive American posture of the war’s earlier weeks.

On the nuclear file, the participants are expected to endorse, but not yet formalize, a proposal floated by Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry for a regional inspection regime that would supplement, rather than replace, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran’s remaining enrichment capacity, after Israeli strikes destroyed or damaged at least four major sites in March and early April, is believed by Western intelligence to be a fraction of pre-war levels, but the question of what Tehran does with what remains has become central to Israeli political debate.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement Monday that Israel “welcomes the convening in Doha” but reserved the right to act against “any reconstitution of the threat.” Opposition leader Yair Lapid called the statement “dangerously ambiguous” and said Israel’s interest lay in “embedding the ceasefire in a structure, not standing outside it.”

European foreign ministers, meeting separately in Luxembourg on Monday for a previously scheduled session, issued a joint communique backing the Doha process and pledging up to 2.4 billion euros in reconstruction support for Iraq and Yemen, conditional on the ceasefire holding through the end of June.

John Reilly, an analyst at Citi who tracks Gulf political risk, said markets were watching Doha closely but had largely priced in a constructive outcome. Brent crude traded near $96 a barrel Monday afternoon, down from a wartime peak above $125. “The tail risk of a return to active conflict is what’s been bleeding out of the price for two weeks,” Reilly said. “Doha doesn’t need to deliver a treaty. It needs to deliver the impression of a process.”

The foreign ministers are scheduled to issue a joint statement Wednesday evening. Officials briefed on the draft said it would announce a working group on maritime security to report by mid-June and a follow-on ministerial in Riyadh in early July.