MARSEILLE — Twenty-two foreign ministers signed a closing communiqué at the Palais du Pharo on Thursday afternoon committing 4.7 billion euros in new humanitarian and reconstruction money to Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria over the next eighteen months and establishing a permanent multilateral secretariat in Aix-en-Provence to coordinate disbursement, mine clearance, refugee returns and Mediterranean shipping insurance — outcomes that exceeded the modest pre-conference expectations of European officials and produced the first joint signed text bearing the names of Iranian and Israeli delegations since the Islamabad ceasefire took effect three weeks ago.

French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné, flanked at the closing rostrum by EU High Representative Kaja Kallas, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan and Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, said the package combined 1.6 billion euros of European bilateral and EU-budget commitments, 1.9 billion euros from Gulf states channeled largely through a restructured Islamic Development Bank facility, 600 million euros in European Investment Bank guarantees and 600 million euros in multilateral commitments led by the World Bank and the UN Development Programme. A separate Japanese envelope of 240 million euros, announced late Thursday morning, was folded into the multilateral track.

“Marseille did not end a war that ended three weeks ago in Islamabad,” Séjourné said. “Marseille gave that ending an address, a budget and a calendar. We will measure the conference by whether teams arrive in Basra, in Sanaa, in Khorramshahr, in Tyre, with money in hand and authority to spend it before the summer is out.”

The communiqué’s most contested provision was the establishment of the Mediterranean Reconstruction Coordination Office, an institution that French and Italian negotiators spent the final twelve hours of the conference wrestling into existence over German reservations about creating new permanent structures. The office, to be headquartered at the Villa Magnan complex in Aix-en-Provence on a five-year mandate, will be led by a director chosen by consensus among the five financing tracks and staffed initially by sixty professionals seconded from member states and multilateral institutions. France will contribute the building and 18 million euros a year in operating costs; the EU budget will fund a further 22 million.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi signed the communiqué shortly after 15:30 local time, becoming the first Iranian official to put his name to a multilateral text co-signed by an Israeli representative since the Iran nuclear framework discussions of the previous decade. Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel signed at a separate table in the same hall, with the French foreign ministry’s protocol chief carrying the document between them — a choreography European officials had spent four days perfecting and which Séjourné described in his closing remarks as “the most expensive walk in Mediterranean diplomatic history.”

Neither delegation addressed the closing plenary, in keeping with the working understanding negotiated before the conference opened on Wednesday. Both governments released parallel statements minutes after signing. Iran’s foreign ministry said the conference had “established practical mechanisms for the restoration of normal civilian life” while reiterating that the Islamabad framework’s sanctions-relief calendar remained “the irreducible test of good faith.” Israel said its signature reflected “operational humanitarian and verification interests” and did not constitute “any modification of Israel’s position regarding the threat posed by Iranian regional conduct.”

The conference’s four working tracks each produced a substantive annex. The civilian-infrastructure track, chaired by Spain, delivered a province-by-province needs assessment covering 187 sites across Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Yemen, with priority disbursement for water, electricity and hospital reconstruction. The refugee-returns track, chaired by Egypt, committed signatories to a 90-day window during which return processing would be expedited and unconditional. The shipping-insurance track, chaired by Greece, secured Lloyd’s of London and three Gulf reinsurers’ agreement to reopen full coverage of Strait of Hormuz transits at premium rates not to exceed 130 percent of pre-war levels. The “post-conflict information environment” track, chaired by Belgium, produced a voluntary code of conduct on deepfake audio and video, signed by sixteen delegations and noted with reservations by four.

“This is a real document, not a communiqué of intentions,” said Marwa Daoudy, a Middle East scholar at Georgetown University who advised the Egyptian delegation. “The annexes have governance, they have money, they have timelines. Whether they have political longevity will depend on whether the secretariat in Aix becomes a serious institution or another European address that quietly atrophies. Six months from now we will know.”

Iraq, whose insistence on a full negotiating seat had nearly derailed the pre-conference choreography last weekend, emerged with a co-signature on the disbursement protocol governing the Gulf trust fund and a guaranteed seat on the secretariat’s executive board. Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein, addressing reporters at the Iraqi delegation’s hotel near the Vieux-Port shortly before the closing session, called the outcome “the recognition our country was owed” and said Baghdad would now pursue similar status at the Vienna nuclear talks resuming next week. A senior Saudi official told reporters the kingdom would not oppose an Iraqi observer seat in Vienna if Washington and the IAEA secretariat assented.

The United States, represented by Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, signed the communiqué without joining either the secretariat’s funding pool or the new Gulf trust fund. Campbell, in brief remarks to reporters after the signing, said the administration’s contribution would run through existing bilateral channels and through the $400 million humanitarian appropriation Congress passed on April 11. A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Washington had “no appetite” for a new multilateral institution headquartered in Europe but viewed the secretariat’s emergence as “a constructive European initiative we can work alongside.”

Russia and China signed without reservations. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, briefing Russian state media at the Palais du Pharo, called the document “balanced” and said Moscow expected the Security Council to receive a formal briefing from the secretariat’s interim director within sixty days. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Deng Li signed the shipping-insurance annex with a separate written commitment to extend Chinese state reinsurance to Gulf-flagged carriers transiting the strait, a provision Greek and Maltese shipowners had quietly lobbied for since the ceasefire.

Outside the Palais du Pharo, several hundred demonstrators — a mix of Iranian-diaspora opposition supporters, pro-Palestinian protesters and a smaller Israeli civic group — held competing rallies along the Vieux-Port that French police separated with crowd-control barriers. There were three arrests for public-order offenses, the prefecture said. Inside the conference hall, the closing handshake between Séjourné and Kallas drew a standing ovation from the assembled delegations that lasted nearly two minutes.

The Aix-en-Provence secretariat will begin operations on June 1 under an interim director seconded from the UN Development Programme, French officials said. Officials said the first disbursement tranches, covering hospital reconstruction in Anbar and water-system repair in southern Lebanon, would be announced in Aix within the secretariat’s first three weeks.