The United Nations Security Council on Sunday endorsed the Islamabad ceasefire framework by a 13-0 vote with abstentions from Russia and China, giving the eleven-day-old truce between Iran and Israel a binding legal anchor and authorizing an expanded monitoring presence at the Strait of Hormuz and along the Iraq-Iran border.

Resolution 2741, drafted by Pakistan and co-sponsored by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the three mediating governments that produced the Islamabad framework on April 12, took the Council nine days of closed-door negotiation to reach the chamber. The text passed at a Sunday afternoon session called specifically to avoid the Marseille reconstruction conference that opens in France on May 6, diplomats said, so that European foreign ministers would arrive in the south of France with the resolution already in force.

The resolution endorses the four phases of the Islamabad framework, authorizes the deployment of up to 1,200 UN-mandated observers across the Strait of Hormuz, the Iran-Iraq border and selected sites in Yemen and Lebanon, calls on member states to support reconstruction financing and refugee return, and tasks the secretary-general with reporting on implementation every sixty days. It does not assign blame for the war, does not establish a tribunal, and does not freeze the existing sanctions architecture on Iran, all points that mediators removed from earlier drafts to secure passage.

Pakistan’s permanent representative, Munir Akram, who presided over the negotiations as the lead drafter, told the chamber after the vote that the resolution was “the floor and not the ceiling” of what the Council could do for the region. “Eleven days ago this ceasefire was a piece of paper signed in a hotel in Islamabad,” Akram said. “Today it is the law of the Council. That is not a small thing for the people of southern Iran, of Beirut, of Sanaa, of Basra, who have spent two years asking whether anyone in this building remembered that they were here.”

The Russian deputy permanent representative, Dmitry Polyanskiy, explained his delegation’s abstention in a statement that praised the mediating troika but criticized what he called the resolution’s “asymmetric posture” toward Iranian and Israeli obligations. Moscow, Polyanskiy said, had pressed unsuccessfully for language requiring Israeli withdrawal from positions occupied during the war and for an explicit reference to Iranian sovereignty over disputed nuclear sites. “We did not vote against this text because we support the ceasefire and we support the mediators,” he said. “We did not vote for it because it sets a precedent that the Council can endorse arrangements concluded outside its own deliberations as long as the right capitals find them convenient.”

China’s representative, Geng Shuang, offered a parallel explanation focused on the resolution’s treatment of sanctions and reconstruction financing. Beijing, Geng said, had wanted the text to acknowledge what he called “the disproportionate burden borne by Iranian civilians from the unilateral coercive measures imposed before, during and after the conflict.” He said China would support the monitoring deployment and contribute to reconstruction “through bilateral channels and through the Belt and Road framework,” and reiterated Beijing’s offer to host a follow-on conference on regional security architecture later in the year.

The U.S. permanent representative, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said the vote represented “the moment the Council caught up to what mediators had already achieved on the ground.” Thomas-Greenfield said Washington had accepted language that softened references to Iranian compliance obligations in exchange for Russian and Chinese acquiescence, and described the resolution as “a working document for a working ceasefire, not a victory speech.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, attending the session in person for what diplomats said was his first appearance in the Council chamber since the war began, called the resolution “an imperfect but necessary recognition that the war is over and that the work of reconstruction belongs to the region, not to the powers that armed and financed its escalation.” Araghchi confirmed that Iran would cooperate with the expanded monitoring deployment and said Tehran was preparing to host a delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency in the first week of May to discuss the resumption of inspections at sites not damaged in Israeli strikes.

Israel’s permanent representative, Danny Danon, voted in favor but used his explanation of vote to reject what he called any reading of the resolution that would limit Israeli self-defense. “Israel did not start this war and Israel did not seek this war,” Danon said. “Israel agreed to a ceasefire because the ceasefire serves Israeli security. If that calculation changes, this resolution will not be the instrument that constrains it.” A senior Israeli diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity afterward, said the language on monitoring access to Israeli-held positions had been “the hardest fight” in the final round of drafting and that Jerusalem had secured carve-outs for what it described as sensitive defense infrastructure.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, who flew to New York for the session, said Riyadh would contribute one hundred personnel to the Hormuz monitoring deployment and would chair a Gulf donor coordination meeting on the margins of the Marseille conference.

The resolution’s reconstruction language, while non-binding, calls on member states to “consider favorably” contributions to a multilateral trust fund that the World Bank is preparing to host. Pledges already announced or telegraphed total roughly $14 billion over three years, with the largest commitments from the European Union, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Japan and South Korea. U.S. officials have signaled a contribution near $2 billion, contingent on congressional approval that several senators have already said will be contested.

Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst at the Carnegie Middle East Center, said the resolution mattered less for what it imposed than for what it stabilized. “The mediators have spent two weeks worried that the ceasefire would survive its first violation and not survive its second,” Hassan said. “Resolution 2741 does not stop a future violation, but it makes the political cost of one higher. That is what a Council resolution is good for in cases like this.”

The Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said in a statement after the vote that the first observer rotations would deploy by May 5 and that his special envoy for the post-war phase, the Tunisian diplomat Khemaies Jhinaoui, would travel to Tehran and Jerusalem in the coming week. Officials said an initial sixty-day implementation report would be presented to the Council in late June, and that subsequent steps on reconstruction financing and refugee return would be coordinated with the Marseille declaration once that document was issued.