The United Nations Security Council voted 14-0-1 Wednesday morning to endorse the Islamabad ceasefire framework hours after the truce between Iran and Israel took effect, opening a diplomatic phase that will be tested almost immediately by a foreign-ministers’ conference in Paris and by a contested debate over whether sanctions relief belongs on the table at all.

Resolution 2748, drafted jointly by the United States, France and Pakistan with last-minute amendments brokered by the United Kingdom, authorizes a 90-day United Nations observer mission at the Strait of Hormuz, takes note of the Omani and Swiss verification roles set out in the Islamabad annex, and instructs the Secretary-General to report back to the Council every 30 days on compliance. Russia abstained on the final text. China voted in favor after Beijing’s mission negotiated language acknowledging “the legitimate interest of all parties in a phased normalization of trade and financial relations” — a sentence Western diplomats had resisted for two days before accepting it as a price for unanimity short of one abstention.

“The Council has done its part,” U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said in remarks on the floor immediately after the vote, which was held shortly before 5 a.m. Eastern time to coincide with the truce taking effect at 00:00 GMT. “The harder work now belongs to capitals, to the mediators in Islamabad, and to the inspectors who will be in the field by the end of the week.”

Russia’s deputy permanent representative, Dmitry Polyanskiy, explained his country’s abstention as a protest against what he called the resolution’s failure to “address the architecture of unilateral coercive measures that fueled this war.” Iran’s permanent observer to the United Nations, Saeed Iravani, attended the session and read a short statement welcoming the resolution while reiterating Tehran’s position that “no durable peace is possible while economic warfare continues by other means.” Israel’s ambassador, who did not speak in the open chamber, issued a written note thanking the Council for its endorsement of the verification regime.

The vote unfolded against a backdrop of cautious early signals from the region. By 6 a.m. GMT, more than six hours into the ceasefire, no major exchanges of fire had been reported between Iran and Israel, though U.S. Central Command logged what it described as a “single inconclusive radar event” near the Bab el-Mandeb strait that did not result in a launch. Omani naval observers were already aboard a designated monitoring platform off Khasab, and Swiss inspectors departed Geneva on a chartered flight bound for Tehran shortly after the resolution passed.

In Paris, where French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné had summoned counterparts late Sunday, the conference is now expected to draw foreign ministers or deputies from roughly a dozen countries by Wednesday evening, including Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan and Japan. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is sending Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau, a decision French officials privately described as a disappointment but publicly accepted without comment. The European Union’s High Representative, Kaja Kallas, will attend with the bloc’s special envoy for the Gulf.

A senior French diplomat, briefing reporters at the Quai d’Orsay on condition of anonymity ahead of the meeting, said the conference would not seek a single communique. Instead, it would aim to align positions on three “load-bearing” questions: how to staff and finance the observer presence over its first six months; how to sequence any humanitarian carve-outs from existing sanctions; and how to manage the question of Hezbollah’s residual missile stocks, which the Islamabad framework addresses only obliquely.

“We are not in Paris to negotiate with Iran,” the diplomat said. “We are in Paris so that the next time we sit down with Iran, we know what we want.”

Arab capitals signaled they would press for an accelerated humanitarian track. Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, in remarks at King Khalid International Airport before departing for Paris, said the Gulf Cooperation Council had agreed in principle to underwrite a $400 million reconstruction trust focused on hospitals and water infrastructure in Iraq, Yemen and southern Iran, conditional on a parallel International Atomic Energy Agency declaration that Iranian enrichment activity had been suspended at agreed sites. Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, who co-led the Islamabad mediation, said in Cairo that “the moral burden has shifted” to the parties to demonstrate compliance in the coming weeks.

“You have a unanimous Council, you have a Paris meeting, you have inspectors on planes,” said Vali Nasr, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in a telephone interview. “What you do not yet have is a single political constituency in any of these capitals that is willing to spend domestic capital on the unglamorous follow-through. That gap is where ceasefires die.”

In Brussels, the European Commission announced an emergency aid tranche of 280 million euros for civilian reconstruction, drawn from the Union’s external action reserve, and said separate negotiations would begin Thursday on whether to suspend specific transactional sanctions on Iranian humanitarian imports for a renewable 90-day window. A Commission spokesperson, Eric Mamer, declined to commit to a timeline on broader sanctions review, saying member states remained “in different places” on the question.

Asian responses came in measured tones. Japan’s foreign minister, Yoko Kamikawa, said Tokyo would contribute personnel to the UN observer mission and would resume a previously suspended dialogue with Iran on maritime safety. South Korea’s foreign ministry welcomed the Council vote and announced the partial lifting of an advisory against travel to the Gulf for non-essential business. India’s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, said New Delhi was “ready to facilitate normal commerce” in the Gulf and that Indian-flagged shipping would resume scheduled transits through the Strait of Hormuz beginning Thursday.

The Trump administration, while supporting the Security Council resolution, continued to draw a hard line on sanctions architecture. In a background call with reporters shortly after the vote, a senior State Department official said the United States viewed the Council action as “necessary scaffolding” but stressed that “the sanctions framework is not part of the ceasefire, was not part of the Islamabad text, and is not what the Paris meeting is about as far as we are concerned.” The official said additional U.S. designations against entities linked to Iranian missile production remained “under active review.”

That position is expected to be the dominant point of friction in Paris. A senior European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of the conference, said the divergence between Washington and most European capitals on the pacing of sanctions relief was “real but manageable,” provided early verification milestones were met. “If the inspectors get the access they have been promised,” the diplomat said, “the politics of selective relief become easier. If they do not, the politics get harder for everyone.”

Mediators in Islamabad said the deputy-minister-level follow-on meeting first floated last week would now take place in May, with Oman and Switzerland co-hosting a technical session in Geneva the following week to formalize the inspectors’ access protocols. Pakistani officials said additional confidence-building measures, including the precise timetable for the Doha prisoner exchange and the deployment schedule for European technical observers, would be announced before the end of the week.