MANAMA — Saudi Arabia and Iran completed the first live drill of the deconfliction hotline established between their naval commands on Wednesday afternoon, the operational test the two governments had pledged when the framework text was finalized in Muscat over the weekend. The drill, conducted from the Saudi Royal Naval Forces operations center at King Faisal Naval Base in Jeddah and from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy command facility at Bandar Abbas, ran for ninety minutes and tested both voice and encrypted-text procedures.

Officials in both governments described the exercise as “uneventful in the constructive sense” — the phrase used by a senior Iranian foreign ministry official briefing reporters in Tehran. The drill simulated three scenarios: a navigation incident involving a commercial tanker in the central Strait of Hormuz, a search-and-rescue coordination call for a small craft south of Lavan Island, and an unscheduled close approach by an unmanned surface vessel along the median line of the Persian Gulf. In each case, the operations rooms exchanged information, confirmed positions on a shared geographic reference system, and agreed on a deconfliction action within established response windows.

The hotline was the most concrete operational outcome of the Riyadh-Tehran consultations that closed in Muscat on Sunday under Omani auspices. Its activation has been one of the steps that diplomats from both sides have pointed to in arguing that the post-war diplomatic architecture between the two regional rivals can hold even as the larger framework of normalization between them — paused since the 2023 Beijing-brokered restoration of relations and complicated by the Iran-Israel conflict that ended with the April 15 ceasefire — remains under stress.

A senior Saudi defense ministry official, contacted Wednesday evening, characterized the hotline as “a working tool, not a political symbol.” The official said the procedural protocols, drafted by working-level teams over three sessions in March and April, had been written in deliberately narrow terms: the channel handles maritime navigation, search-and-rescue and accidental encounters, and is not authorized as a vehicle for broader political messaging. “Anything bigger goes through the foreign ministry channels,” the official said.

In parallel with the naval drill, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Hajj and Umrah opened the dedicated Iranian-pilgrim application channel that had been agreed in Muscat, beginning what is expected to be a roughly six-week processing window for the 2026 Hajj season. The channel, operated jointly by the Saudi ministry and a designated Iranian consular office in Jeddah, is intended to permit a substantially larger Iranian pilgrim contingent than had been able to participate in 2025, when wartime travel restrictions and visa delays compressed the cohort to roughly a third of its historical norm.

Iran’s hajj organization, in a statement carried by Iranian state media Wednesday, said the country had been allocated 86,400 pilgrim slots for the 2026 season, slightly above its 2019 pre-COVID figure of 86,000. The first batch of applications, the agency said, would be processed beginning Sunday, with the first chartered flights expected to depart Tehran for Jeddah on June 10.

The dual track — the technical naval channel and the consular Hajj channel — has been the architecture that diplomats from both governments have pointed to when arguing that the Muscat framework can be sustained even if larger questions, including Iran’s regional security posture and the trajectory of the post-war IAEA inspection regime now being negotiated, remain difficult.

In a closely watched parallel development, the United Nations Security Council is expected to take up later this week the report submitted Monday by IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi on the preparatory framework for the post-war inspections program. Iranian officials have indicated they expect the inspections track to proceed, though the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee has continued to push for tighter parameters than the document Grossi has drafted.

Saudi officials have generally welcomed the inspection track as the most plausible mechanism for stabilizing the region’s nuclear file in a way that does not require either a return to the 2015 JCPOA framework or a unilateral Western enforcement architecture, both of which Riyadh has consistently argued are insufficient. A senior official in the Saudi foreign ministry, briefing analysts on Tuesday evening, said the kingdom was “more interested in what is inspected and how frequently than in the precise label put on the framework.”

The Muscat framework also included a less-publicized track on Houthi-related maritime incidents in the southern Red Sea. Officials in both Riyadh and Tehran have indicated that the channel has been operational for roughly three weeks but has not yet been tested in a live incident. A small-scale Houthi attack on a commercial vessel off the Yemeni coast in mid-April, the last confirmed incident of its kind, predated the channel’s activation.

Outside observers have offered a measured assessment. A senior Western diplomat in the region, speaking on background, said the hotline test was “a good thing on its merits and a small thing in the larger picture.” The diplomat noted that the more significant tests of the Muscat framework were likely to come later this year, when the post-war reconstruction calendar in Iran, the Saudi-led GCC summit in November, and the parallel U.S.-Iran diplomatic track were all expected to require coordinated responses.

For now, both governments appeared inclined to allow the technical channels to develop quietly rather than amplify the moment politically. A spokesperson at the Iranian foreign ministry, asked whether Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi would speak publicly about the drill, said only that the minister had “noted the result and expressed satisfaction with the working level.”

The second scheduled drill of the hotline is to take place on June 17.