Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has accused Israel of fanning the flames of war in the Middle East and said he hoped Iran could avoid being dragged into acting in a way “not worthy” of it, as he spoke to the media on his first official visit to the US.
The reformist, who took office in July after winning an election on a ticket of better relations with the west, said during a roundtable with journalists as he attended the UN general assembly in New York that no one benefited from war and that anyone who said otherwise was deluding themselves.
“We know more than anyone else that if a larger war were to erupt in the Middle East, it will not benefit anyone throughout the world. It is Israel that seeks to create this wider conflict,” he said.
Tensions soared immediately after his inauguration as the visiting political chief of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in an operation in Tehran that was widely attributed to Israel.
Pezeshkian said he was repeatedly told to hold back a response to the killing because Israel was within a week or two of signing a peace agreement, but that peace remained elusive.
“We tried not to respond but unfortunately that elusive week never came,” he said adding that he believed Iran had been lied to. “There is no winner in warfare, everyone loses in war and conflict. We are only deluding ourselves if we think someone will be victorious in a regional war.”
He also said: “Every day Israel is committing more atrocities and killing more and more people – old, young, men, women, children, hospitals, other facilities.”
Western diplomats are still assessing Pezeshkian after two months in office dominated by conflict in the region.
He did not spell out how much damage had been done to the Iran-backed Lebanese militants Hezbollah in Israel’s most recent wave of attacks and did not reply directly when asked if Iran would now respond more directly to Israel.
“We always keep hearing, well, Hezbollah fired a rocket. If Hezbollah didn’t even do that minimum, who would defend them?” he said. “Curiously enough, we keep being labelled as the perpetrator of insecurity. But look at the situation for where it is.”
He denied that Iran had not shown its own deterrence power, arguing that in its response to Israel’s destruction of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, which killed at least 11 people including a senior commander in the al-Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iranian forces had penetrated Israel’s Iron Dome air defences and shown that it could have killed civilians.
Speaking on the record for an hour to a group of almost exclusively US reporters, Pezeshkian became most animated as he accused western politicians and media of double standards in demanding human rights while at the same time remaining silent over the horrors in Gaza. “Where else in the world where countries that on the surface are committed to human rights allow these killings?” he asked.
He said Iran was willing to reopen talks on the nuclear deal that broke down more than a year ago, insisting the religious fatwa against Iran possessing nuclear weapons remained, and it was part of the Islamic Republic’s military doctrine.
He was sitting alongside the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who earlier said on Telegram that Tehran was focused on initiating a new round of nuclear negotiations.
“We are prepared, and if the other parties are also prepared, we can have another beginning of the talks during this trip,” Pezeshkian said.
He noted that he had been among a group of MPs who had vehemently defended the Iran nuclear deal with the west, including providing the UN nuclear weapons inspectorate with unfettered access to Iran’s nuclear programme. “We are still ready to sign up to the framework we agreed to,” he said, adding that the US withdrawal from the deal initiated by Donald Trump in 2018 was “illegal, unfair, unjust and not right”.
Pezeshkian denied Iran was running a series of proxy militia groups hostile to Israel, saying the west aimed to present Iran with an “inhumane face”. The Houthis in Yemen “cannot be subjected to our will”, he said. “How can we ask them to abstain from reacting to these crimes?”
He said he was seeking talks with the west about the war in Ukraine and said that during his presidency no short-range missiles had been sent from Iran to Russia for use in Ukraine, a formulation that leaves out the US intelligence claim that a contract to send missiles was probably signed last summer by his predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi.
Pezeshkian said Iran did not support what he described as Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, and he said the borders of countries should be respected.
He scoffed at suggestions that Iran was funding anti-Israeli demonstrations, describing the allegation as absurd and pointing out that Iran was having a hard time covering its own payroll.