Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Monday that his country will respond to Israel for the July assassination of Hamas’s political leader in Tehran but said “we do not wish to be the causes of instability in the region.”
The Iranian president said Tehran agreed to wait to respond because of U.S. warnings that a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza was days away but that Washington has misled the world about the status of those talks.
“They told us earlier to prevent a larger war to wait another week or so for peace to be obtained,” he said. “Clearly the politicians that lie to us these days … lie to you as well.”
He said Israel’s attack will “not go unanswered.”
Pezeshkian said Iran will continue to back Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant and political movement, so long as Israel is being armed by the United States.
“We are willing to put all of our weapons aside, so long as Israel is willing to do the same,” he said. “But we cannot have outside actors come in, arm one side to the teeth and prevent the other side from having the means to defend themselves.”
Iran has long backed Hezbollah with military support as it has become an increasingly dominant force in Lebanon. Since the Israel-Gaza war erupted nearly a year ago, Hezbollah and Israel have regularly traded fire, displacing tens of thousands of people on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border.
Pezeshkian defended Hezbollah’s rocket fire into Israel, saying it represented the bare “minimum” in response to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
“We always keep hearing, ‘Well, Hezbollah fired a rocket.’ If Hezbollah didn’t even do this minimum, who would defend” the Palestinians, he asked.
In July, Pezeshkian, a little-known reformist candidate and cardiac surgeon, defeated an ultraconservative rival to become Iran’s president. He campaigned on a platform endorsing more social freedoms and engagement with the West and described his victory as the start of “a new chapter” for the country.
To mark his inauguration, Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh traveled to Tehran, where he was killed in an explosion in his guesthouse. His death has been widely attributed to Israel, though the Israeli government has not publicly acknowledged that it was behind the apparent assassination.
Pezeshkian said the attack was “condemnable under all international laws” and was intended to initiate a regional war that would cause suffering for all sides.
“There is no winner in warfare; everyone loses on all sides in warfare and conflict,” he said.In his remarks to reporters, Pezeshkian also denied any Iranian involvement in supporting pro-Palestinian campus protests in the United States, saying Tehran has enough problems covering its “domestic payroll.” He then asked rhetorically, “How do we supply payroll to American students?”
The Iranian president was responding to claims by U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, who said in July that the United States has “observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.”
The Iranian president praised the U.S. students for seeking truth and justice, and dismissed the U.S. allegation as absurd.
“So none of these American students have a conscience? … They just seek money?” he said.
Asked whether Iran planned to free Nobel Peace Prize laureate and women’s rights defender Narges Mohammadi, who has been serving a decade-long prison sentence, Pezeshkian declined to answer directly, saying that “we are attempting to resolve our own internal problems by ourselves.”
Source » washingtonpost