Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Sunday that Tehran stands firm against anyone who attacks the country and that it “will respond with power”, a day after apologising to its neighbours but maintaining it considers “facilities that are the origin and source of aggressive actions” against Iran “legitimate targets”.
The statement comes amid the ongoing US and Israel’s war on Iran, which began on February 28 with Washington and Tel Aviv’s joint strikes, killing the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several other top officials. Since then, the war has engulfed the entire region, with Iran retaliating by targeting US and Israeli assets and bases in the entire West Asia.
“America and Israel, who shamelessly kill 168 innocent children and massacre 50,000 to 60,000 people in Gaza, have no shame. Yet, they want to claim that we in Iran want to kill people? We stand firm against anyone who attacks our country. We will respond with power,” Pezeshkian said in a statement carried by the Iranian state media.
The Iranian leader clarified his apology statement from Saturday, saying Iran was sorry if the “dear people of the region” were worried about the situation.
“As for the claim that we apologised, we are only sorry if the dear people in the region were worried by these disputes. But naturally, we will respond to those who attacked us from their soil, and we are doing so with power. These two things are separate,” he said.
Pezeshkian called on the countries in the region, whom he called “brothers”, to not allow Israel and the US to “deceive” them.
“We are friends with the countries in the region; they are our brothers. As I said yesterday, we must work together, hand in hand, and not allow Israel and America to deceive us into standing against one another,” he said.
Trump ‘not interested’ in settling
US President Donald Trump said he is not interested in negotiating with Iran, raising the possibility that the Iran war would only end once Tehran no longer has a functioning military and its leadership is completely wiped out.
Shortly after Trump spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One, Israel announced fresh strikes across Iran early on Sunday, with the war that has brought chaos to West Asia and roiled global oil markets in its second week.
“At some point, I don’t think there will be anybody left maybe to say, ‘We surrender,'” Trump said.
Trump has justified the biggest US military operation in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq by saying Tehran posed an imminent threat to the United States, without providing evidence. He has also said Iran was too close to being able to build a nuclear weapon.
The US and Israel have discussed sending special forces into Iran to secure its stockpile of highly enriched uranium at a later stage of the war, Axios reported, citing four people with knowledge of the discussions.
Asked about the possibility of sending ground troops to secure nuclear sites on Saturday, Trump said it was something they could do “later on.”
The governments of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain reported Iranian drone attacks in their countries on Saturday and early Sunday, with a huge fire engulfing a government office block in Kuwait.