Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates urged Washington and Tehran on Monday to convert the six-day-old ceasefire into a permanent regional security framework, as United Nations monitors widened their patrols across the Strait of Hormuz and a new round of follow-on talks opened in Muscat.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, speaking after a closed-door meeting with his Emirati counterpart in Riyadh, said the Gulf Cooperation Council would press for a “binding architecture” to replace the fragile arrangement that took effect Apr. 15. He said the current pause, brokered through Islamabad and welcomed by the United States, Israel and Iran, had so far held but lacked the verification machinery needed to survive a single serious incident.

“A truce is not an architecture,” Prince Faisal said. “We have lost too much in six weeks to leave this to goodwill. The Gulf will not return to the volatility of March.”

The Emirati foreign minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, told reporters that the GCC was circulating a draft proposal that would establish a standing maritime patrol with rotating Gulf, Pakistani and Egyptian command, a joint incident-deconfliction cell in Muscat and a quarterly ministerial review. He said the plan had been shared with U.S. Secretary of State and with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi during separate calls over the weekend.

Araghchi, in remarks carried by Iranian state television, said Tehran was willing to discuss “any framework that respects Iran’s sovereignty and its right to peaceful nuclear activity” but warned that any architecture imposing new restrictions on Iranian shipping or air defenses would be rejected. He repeated Tehran’s demand that the United States lift a tranche of sanctions imposed during the war, calling them “the most visible obstacle” to a durable settlement.

A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Washington was reviewing the GCC paper and viewed it as “a useful basis” for follow-on discussion but cautioned that the administration would not endorse any mechanism that constrained U.S. naval freedom of navigation in the strait. The official said President Donald Trump had been briefed on the GCC initiative on Sunday and had instructed his team to coordinate closely with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

Israel, which has not formally responded to the Gulf proposal, has signaled through diplomatic channels that any regional framework must include verifiable limits on Iranian missile production and a clearer accounting of Tehran’s centrifuge stockpile. Prime Minister’s office spokesman Eylon Levy said in a written statement that Israel “welcomes Arab leadership in stabilizing the region” but would judge any agreement by its enforcement provisions.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres, in a statement issued from Geneva, said the world body had expanded its observer deployment in the Strait of Hormuz to 84 personnel, up from 52 at the start of the week, and had begun joint patrols with Omani and Pakistani naval vessels. Two additional monitoring stations were being established on the Iranian coast near Bandar Abbas and on the Omani side near Khasab, he said, with the consent of both governments.

The expansion follows two minor incidents reported over the weekend — a Houthi cruise missile launch from northern Yemen, which Saudi air defenses intercepted over the Red Sea, and a single rocket fired from a militia-controlled area in eastern Iraq toward a U.S. logistics hub in Kuwait, which fell short. Both episodes were condemned by Tehran, which has publicly distanced itself from Houthi and Iraqi militia operations since the ceasefire took effect.

“The ceasefire is holding, but it is not yet stable,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst at the Carnegie Middle East Center. “What the Gulf states are trying to do this week is buy themselves insurance against the next miscalculation. Whether Washington and Tehran can be brought into a single room to sign onto that insurance is the question of the next 30 days.”

Hassan said the Saudi-Emirati push reflected genuine alarm in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi over the economic damage already inflicted by the six-week war, which by some estimates wiped roughly $180 billion off regional GDP and disrupted shipping flows through Hormuz for much of March. Brent crude, which spiked above $125 a barrel in late March, was trading near $96 in early Monday sessions in London.

In Muscat, the new round of talks brought together deputy foreign ministers from Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, alongside U.S. and European Union observers. Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, who hosted the opening session at the Al Bustan Palace, said the agenda included prisoner-status follow-up after the Apr. 18 Doha exchange, the monitoring architecture and a humanitarian corridor for reconstruction goods bound for Iraq and Yemen.

The Doha exchange, in which Iran released roughly 40 detained foreigners along with the remains of U.S. service members in return for Iranian and Hezbollah-affiliated detainees, has been described by diplomats from three of the participating governments as the single most important confidence-builder since the ceasefire began. A second, smaller exchange involving Israeli and Iranian-held dual nationals was under discussion, two officials said, but had not been finalized.

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, arriving in Muscat late Sunday, said the bloc was prepared to underwrite portions of the verification regime, including satellite monitoring and technical inspection costs, and would seek a mandate from EU foreign ministers at their meeting next week. “Europe cannot afford another March,” she said. “We will pay to make sure there is not one.”

John Reilly, an analyst at Citi, said in a note to clients that markets had largely priced in a ceasefire that holds through the second quarter but would react sharply to any sign that the Muscat track was stalling. “The next two weeks are the test,” he wrote. “Either the framework gains a spine, or it begins to dissolve.”

Officials at the Muscat talks said an interim communiqué was expected by Wednesday, with further ministerial-level meetings to be announced before the end of the month.