MARSEILLE — Foreign ministers, reconstruction envoys and multilateral finance officials converged on the southern French port on Tuesday for the May 6 opening of the Mediterranean reconstruction conference, as French organizers settled a working-group plan that keeps the Iranian and Israeli delegations physically apart inside the Palais du Pharo while binding all twenty-two participating governments to a single set of pledging benchmarks.

The choreography, finalized over the weekend by a four-government sherpa team and circulated to delegations late Monday, gives Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for European Affairs Majid Takht-Ravanchi and Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel separate ministerial suites on opposite wings of the nineteenth-century palace, identical speaking allocations in the opening plenary and parallel — never overlapping — slots in the four technical tracks. Neither minister will sit at a working-group table with the other, French officials confirmed, but both will be in the main hall during the Wednesday-morning address by President Emmanuel Macron and the closing communiqué reading scheduled for Thursday afternoon.

“Marseille was never going to be a handshake,” French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné told reporters at a midday briefing at the Préfecture des Bouches-du-Rhône, flanked by Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani and Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty. “Marseille is a budget meeting attended by twenty-two foreign ministries. We are here to put numbers on paper, addresses on envelopes and a calendar on the wall.”

The numbers, according to a draft of the conference’s headline financial annex seen by reporters Tuesday evening, are sharper than European officials had signaled in the run-up. The annex sets a four-year pledging envelope of 38.4 billion euros for civilian infrastructure repair across Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, with explicit sub-allocations for water and sanitation, hospital reconstruction, port and refinery rebuilds, mine-action and refugee-return logistics. The European Union is expected to commit 9.6 billion euros across the four-year window, the Gulf Cooperation Council an additional 8.1 billion through the trust fund Riyadh and Abu Dhabi announced in Muscat last week, and Japan, South Korea and Australia between them roughly 4.4 billion. The United States, according to two European officials familiar with the draft, is expected to contribute 1.2 billion in non-military assistance routed through the U.N. Development Programme, a figure that several delegations privately described as “modest but politically intelligible.”

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, who threatened on Friday to withhold consent from any Marseille package that bypassed Baghdad’s ministries, was scheduled to arrive Tuesday night and meet Mr. Macron at the Élysée’s regional residence before the opening. A senior Iraqi official, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe a private exchange, said al-Sudani had received written assurances from Paris that all reconstruction funds touching Iraqi territory would be disbursed through Iraqi line ministries, with multilateral oversight but without parallel European or Gulf implementing units. “Baghdad is not arriving to be a beneficiary,” the official said. “Baghdad is arriving to be a signatory.”

The Israeli delegation flew into Marignane on Tuesday afternoon. Ms. Haskel told Israeli reporters before boarding in Tel Aviv that Israel’s participation should not be read as endorsement of any specific Iranian financial entitlement, and that her government would insist on contractual language excluding fourteen Iranian holding companies it has linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Israeli list, circulated to the contact group in Muscat last week, has been adopted into the draft communiqué as an annex requiring case-by-case review rather than as a binding exclusion, according to two diplomats with knowledge of the text.

The Iranian delegation, which traveled overnight from Tehran via a Qatar Airways charter, declined to speak to reporters at the airport. In a statement issued by the Iranian foreign ministry’s press office Tuesday evening, Mr. Takht-Ravanchi said Iran came to Marseille “in good faith and with realistic expectations,” and reiterated Tehran’s position that reconstruction financing should not be conditioned on issues outside the scope of the Islamabad framework — a clear reference to Israeli efforts to bring missile-restraint language into the financing track.

“What you are watching in Marseille is the European Union trying to play the role that the United States declined to play,” said Pierre Vautrin, director of the Mediterranean Studies Program at Sciences Po, in a telephone interview. “It is not glamorous diplomacy. It is plumbing. But plumbing is what determines whether ceasefires last beyond their first ninety days.”

Outside the formal program, several bilateral tracks are scheduled to run in parallel. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan is to meet separately with Iraqi and Syrian counterparts to advance Ankara’s proposed reconstruction corridor across northern Iraq; a working dinner Wednesday will gather the Pakistani, Saudi and Egyptian mediation troika with Omani and Qatari counterparts to coordinate the next round of Doha framework talks, tentatively set for May 26 in Muscat; and the IAEA’s Massimo Aparo, fresh from Sunday’s inspector arrival in Tehran, is to brief a closed-door technical session on verification metrics that will eventually feed into the Vienna nuclear track.

Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst with the Levant Policy Forum, said the absence of Russia and the limited Chinese participation — Beijing has sent only a deputy commerce minister rather than a foreign-ministry figure — would shape the meeting more than the public agenda suggests. “The architecture being built this week is unambiguously Atlantic-Gulf,” she said. “Moscow and Beijing will work the side rooms, the bilateral tracks and the post-Marseille follow-ups. They are not going to challenge the headline number. They are going to challenge the implementation.”

Security around the Vieux-Port has been visible since Sunday, with French gendarmerie units sealing the perimeter of the Palais du Pharo and three frigates of the Marine Nationale anchored within sight of the harbor entrance. A senior French interior ministry official said the threat picture was “elevated but manageable,” and that the conference would proceed on its published schedule. French officials said a chairs’ summary of the first-day discussions would be released Wednesday evening, with the full communiqué and pledging tables expected by Thursday at the close of the working sessions.