NEW YORK: Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Monday (Sep 23) accused Israel of seeking a wider conflict, insisting that Tehran has been deliberately holding back in the hope of securing regional peace.
“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,” Pezeshkian told a roundtable with journalists as he attended the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Pezeshkian, inaugurated in July as a reformist within the cleric-run state, was making his UN debut as Israel strikes Lebanon following a wave of attacks on handheld communications devices targeting Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah.
Tensions soared immediately after his inauguration as the visiting political chief of Hamas, the Palestinian militants who attacked Israel on Oct 7 last year, was assassinated in an operation in Tehran widely attributed to Israel.
Pezeshkian alluded to appeals from the West for Iran not to retaliate so as not to jeopardise United States efforts for a ceasefire in the Gaza war.
“We tried to not respond. They kept telling us we are within reach of peace, perhaps in a week or so,” he said.
“But we never reached that elusive peace. Every day Israel is committing more atrocities and killing more and more people – old, young, men, women, children, hospitals, other facilities,” he said.
