DUBAI, February 12. /TASS/. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said the US is pushing Israel to attack Iran.
"The US president said that Iran should not have missiles and [nuclear] weapons. They want the Zionist regime (Israel - TASS) to attack Iran as it did Gaza, and us to keet silent in the face of this," he said on Iranian government television.
"America is trying to deprive Iran of any opportunities, forbids others to negotiate with it and then claims that it is ready to negotiate itself. The enemies are trying to sow discord in Iran and disrupt stability in the country," Pezeshkian went on to say.
On February 4, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to restore maximum US pressure on Iran. The measure provides for Washington to intensify its efforts to reduce Iranian oil exports, among other things. At the same time, Trump said he could meet with Pezeshkian and wanted to make a great deal with Tehran.
On February 7, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said talks with the US were impossible, as it had already fooled his country once. Washington signed a nuclear deal with Tehran in 2015, but didn’t meet its terms, failing to lift anti-Iran sanctions and unilaterally pulling out of the deal in 2018, according to Khamenei.
On February 10, Trump said that stopping Tehran from developing nuclear weapons could be done either with bombs or by signing a deal. The US leader added that he would like to make a deal with the Islamic republic without resorting to bombing. Israel has said since the early 2000s that Iran is on the cusp of building a nuclear bomb. Because its presence would pose an existential threat to the Jewish state, Iranian nuclear facilities must be destroyed, according to Israeli officials.