RIYADH — Saudi and Iranian diplomats concluded two days of bilateral talks at the Saudi foreign ministry late Sunday with agreed text for a Persian Gulf naval communications hotline, an opened humanitarian channel governing this year’s Hajj pilgrimage and a decision to defer the more contentious question of border-incident protocols to a late-May session in Muscat, according to separate statements released by both governments before midnight local time.

The outcome, while narrower than some Gulf observers had hoped, gave Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan and Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi enough deliverables to keep alive the bilateral track that Riyadh has tied, at least implicitly, to its $15 billion pledge at the Marseille reconstruction conference. The two delegations emerged with three signed working-level documents and a joint indication that political-level talks would resume on the margins of the multilateral framework session in Oman on May 26.

“This was a meeting that we hope will be remembered as the moment the Gulf began to govern its own waters,” Prince Faisal said in a brief statement read in Arabic and English at the ministry’s press center shortly before 11 p.m. He took no questions. Takht-Ravanchi, in a separate appearance at the Iranian embassy on Diplomatic Quarter Road, said the talks had been “professional and frank” and that the deputy minister was carrying back to Tehran “a document that respects Iran’s sovereignty and the dignity of its people.”

The headline technical deliverable was a four-page memorandum, described by both sides as a “communications and de-confliction annex,” establishing two 24-hour duty lines between the Royal Saudi Naval Forces command at Jeddah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy headquarters at Bandar Abbas, with a secondary link routed through the Omani-hosted Joint Maritime Information Center at Muscat. A separate paragraph commits each side to standardized radio challenges in English and Farsi or Arabic before any boarding or warning shots in the upper Gulf, a provision Western diplomats said reflected lessons from two near-miss encounters during the April prisoner-exchange period.

A senior Saudi official, briefing foreign reporters on background after the closing session, said the hotline architecture would become operational within 30 days and would be tested in a paper exercise observed by Omani liaison officers in early June. The official declined to characterize the document as a treaty, calling it instead “an operational understanding between two navies that have to share the same water.”

The humanitarian basket centered on the Hajj. Saudi officials confirmed the kingdom would process all 87,400 Iranian pilgrim visas already submitted, with a supplementary quota of up to 3,000 if processing capacity permits, and that two charter air corridors would operate from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport and Mashhad to Jeddah during the pilgrimage window beginning in late May. The two governments also agreed to a standing consular channel for emergencies during the Hajj season.

“Pilgrimage was the easy part of this agenda, and it still took a year to get here,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst at the Levant Policy Forum. “What you saw in Riyadh was the deliberate sequencing that the Gulf prefers: maritime safety because it is shared, religious access because it is unavoidable, and borders because it is hardest. Borders went to Muscat for a reason.”

The border-incident question, listed on the published agenda Saturday morning, was the most consequential item left unresolved. Iranian-aligned militias have continued sporadic activity along the Iraqi frontier with Kuwait and the kingdom’s Northern Borders region, and Saudi diplomats had pushed for a written protocol governing how cross-border incidents would be handled and attributed. Iranian officials, according to two diplomats briefed on the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity, were not prepared to commit text on militia-related questions without further consultation in Tehran and signaled the file would be handled more comfortably in a multilateral setting where Iraq, Pakistan and Oman could share the political weight.

“The Iranians did not say no, they said not here and not now,” said one of the diplomats, a European based in the region. “That is a different signal, and the Saudis read it that way.”

The decision to push the border file to Muscat carries its own choreography. The May 26-28 framework session, originally focused on missile and drone restraint, will now also pick up the border protocols, according to an Omani foreign ministry official who spoke to reporters in Muscat on Monday morning. Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, who spoke by phone with both Prince Faisal and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi over the weekend, said the agenda would be finalized at a working-level meeting in Muscat on May 19, the same day the post-war nuclear monitoring track resumes at IAEA headquarters in Vienna.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, who chaired the Doha track that produced the ceasefire, welcomed the Riyadh outcome from Islamabad and said the framework’s mediators were “encouraged but not yet satisfied.”

A senior State Department official, asked about the Riyadh deliverables at a brief gaggle outside the department late Sunday, called the hotline annex “a constructive step that takes pressure off our own naval rules of engagement in the upper Gulf” but said Washington would reserve judgment on the broader bilateral track until after Muscat. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell will lead the U.S. delegation in Oman.

Israeli officials were notably quieter than after the Marseille conference last week. A spokesperson for Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declined to comment beyond a single-sentence statement saying Jerusalem would assess “any Gulf-Iran arrangement by its effect on the security architecture of the region.”

Inside Iran, the reception was complicated by Saturday’s cabinet reshuffle in Tehran, in which President Masoud Pezeshkian accepted the resignations of three senior ministers. Hardline commentators, including Hossein Shariatmadari at Kayhan, accused the government on Monday morning of “trading the wounds of the nation for a hotline.” But Foreign Minister Araghchi, speaking to state television upon Takht-Ravanchi’s return at midday Monday, said the agreed text “protects Iranian forces and Iranian pilgrims, and that is the work of diplomacy.”

The Marseille pledge architecture loomed over every panel in Riyadh. Saudi officials, in their background briefing, declined to characterize the talks’ outcome as sufficient to release the kingdom’s $15 billion package, saying only that the conditional language attached to the pledge would be assessed “in the round” after Muscat. Western diplomats said Riyadh was unlikely to disburse before a written border protocol existed, but the Sunday outcome had at minimum kept the disbursement timeline alive.

Officials said the texts agreed in Riyadh would be tabled at the working-level Muscat preparation meeting next week, and that any further bilateral political-level engagement between the foreign ministers would be coordinated through Omani channels in advance of the framework session.