Pezeshkian: Iran favors peace, opposes wider war in West Asia
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Monday that Iran does not seek a wider war in West Asia and that such a conflict would have no winners.
“We don’t want war….We want to live in peace,” Pezeshkian told a roundtable with journalists as he attended the UN General Assembly in New York.
“We don’t wish to be the cause of instability in the region.”
Pezeshkian called for dialogue to resolve the volatile situation in West Asia and blamed Israel for stoking tensions and instigating conflict, citing assassinations in Tehran and elsewhere that he said Israel had carried out.
“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.
The Iranian president also slammed the United States and other Western countries for what he called double standards as they criticized Iran over human rights but ignored Israel’s “atrocities” in Gaza.
Asked about the possibility of negotiating a new agreement with the United States on Iran’s nuclear program, Pezeshkian said Iran is not interested in a new nuclear deal but to return to the 2015 nuclear accord that the United States pulled out of 2018.
“Let’s go back to step one,” he said.
If all sides lived up to that agreement, then Tehran might consider new talks, the president said.
Pezeshkian, when asked about assessments from US intelligence agencies that Iran was trying to promote campus protests in the US against Israel, rejected the accusation and said it was “childish.”
People around the world are protesting because they outraged at the situation in Gaza and do not need to be bribed to take to the streets, he added.
The United States and its allies claim Iran has supplied Russia with armed drones and ballistic missiles for its war again Ukraine, but Pezeshkian denied Tehran was arming Russia with missiles.
He said Iran opposes “Russian aggression” against Ukraine and called for dialogue to resolve the conflict.
Message of peace,
security
Upon his arrival at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Pezeshkian said he is carrying Iran’s message of peace and security for the world during his trip to New York.
The message, he said, was synonymous with “the slogan that has been adopted by the United Nations this year too.”
“Instead of bloodshed, war, and massacres, we should build a world, in which all humans can live comfortably, notwithstanding their color, race, ethnicity, and the region where they live,” he said.
“And unfortunately, the world we are currently living in is not like that. There are some double standards,” the president noted.
The remarks come amid the all-out political and military support by the United States and many other Western countries for Israel amid the regime’s ongoing genocidal war on the Gaza Strip and daily instances of deadly aggression against the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, and other locations across the region.
During his stay in New York, the Iranian president will address the general assembly on Tuesday, will deliver a speech at the Summit of the Future and will hold various bilateral meetings with foreign officials, including 20 heads of state.
Pezeshkian will also hold separate meetings with American media executives, Shia scholars living in the US, Iranian political elites living in the US, Iranian scientific elites, Iranian entrepreneurs and doctors, Iranian expatriates, secretary general of the United Nations and the president of the European Council.