DOHA — Saudi and Emirati negotiators pressed their Iranian counterparts on Saturday to accept a sharply expanded inspections regime as the second round of the Doha framework talks opened in the Qatari capital, the first sustained diplomatic engagement since last month’s prisoner exchange and a test of whether the April 15 ceasefire can be converted into a durable regional security architecture.

The talks, convened by Qatar and co-chaired by Pakistan and Egypt, drew foreign ministers and senior envoys from eight countries and a small U.S. observer delegation led by Deputy Secretary of State Martin Voorhees. European Union foreign policy chief Marta Stenberg arrived in Doha late Friday and met separately with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi before the formal session began.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan opened the morning plenary by calling for “verifiable, intrusive, and continuous” monitoring of Iran’s remaining enrichment infrastructure and of the dual-use industrial sites struck during the war, according to two diplomats briefed on the closed session. He linked any further Gulf normalization steps to Iranian acceptance of an expanded International Atomic Energy Agency presence and to a region-wide pledge against the transfer of medium-range missile technology to non-state actors.

“The ceasefire bought us time, not peace,” Prince Faisal said in a brief statement on the sidelines. “Peace requires that every capital in this region is able to sleep without watching the sky.”

Iran’s delegation arrived publicly committed to the framework but resistant to what Araghchi has previously called “asymmetric demands.” In remarks to Iranian state media before departing Tehran on Friday, Araghchi said his government would discuss “reciprocal” inspection arrangements that also cover Israeli undeclared facilities, a position Israel has long rejected and that mediators concede is unlikely to gain traction at this stage.

Still, officials involved in the preparatory work said the Iranian team carried more flexibility than at the Islamabad round in April. According to a senior Pakistani official familiar with the agenda, Tehran has signaled willingness to extend the existing UN observer deployment in the Strait of Hormuz for a further six months and to allow IAEA cameras to be reinstalled at two declared sites that had been disconnected before the war.

The Doha framework, agreed in outline on April 12 and which led to the ceasefire taking effect three days later, set out four working baskets: monitoring and verification, missile and drone restraint, prisoner and remains accounting, and a regional economic track. Saturday’s session focused on the first basket. Subsequent rounds, expected at roughly three-week intervals through the summer, will take up the others.

Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst at the Levant Policy Forum, said the choice to begin with monitoring was deliberate. “The Gulf states want to lock in inspection commitments while Iran is still on its back foot economically and while Israeli and U.S. domestic politics remain sympathetic to a hard line,” she said in a telephone interview. “If they wait, the leverage erodes.”

The economic backdrop is unforgiving for Tehran. Iran’s currency has stabilized only modestly since the ceasefire, and the country is contending with damaged refining capacity, a sharp drop in non-oil exports and renewed European sanctions targeting individuals linked to the Houthi supply chain. A Western diplomat in Doha, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private exchanges, said Iranian negotiators had quietly inquired about the conditions under which frozen Iranian assets in two Gulf jurisdictions could be released in tranches tied to verification milestones.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, presiding over a working group on missile and drone restraint that meets Sunday, said the mediators had drafted “objective benchmarks” against which compliance could be measured. “We will not allow this process to be measured in communiques,” he said. “It will be measured in inspection reports and in the silence of our borders.”

The U.S. role remains deliberately understated. President Donald Trump, who has cast the ceasefire as a personal achievement, has delegated day-to-day engagement to Secretary of State Marco Hollis and to Voorhees. A senior State Department official said Washington’s preference was for “Arab-led architecture with American underwrite,” and that the administration was not seeking to negotiate a parallel bilateral track with Tehran at this stage. The official added that the U.S. would, however, condition any future easing of secondary sanctions on Iranian performance under the framework.

Israel is not party to the Doha talks but has sent a small technical liaison to Qatar and is being briefed daily, according to two diplomats. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office reiterated on Saturday that Israel reserved the right to act unilaterally against any reconstitution of Iranian enrichment beyond declared civilian thresholds, a statement Iranian officials denounced as “incompatible with the spirit of the framework.”

Outside the negotiating venue, small groups of demonstrators from the Iranian and Yemeni diasporas gathered with photographs of relatives killed during the war. Qatari police kept the protests orderly. Inside, the diplomatic choreography moved at the slower tempo characteristic of Gulf mediation: long bilateral meetings, short plenaries, no joint press conferences.

A senior Qatari official said the host government did not expect a signed document from this round. The aim, the official said, was a chairs’ statement on Monday outlining areas of convergence and a calendar for the next session, tentatively set for late May in Muscat. Officials cautioned that even modest deliverables would represent meaningful progress given how recently the guns had fallen silent, and said further announcements on the verification track were expected in the coming days.