The Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has said Tehran has shown restraint so far in its response to the Israeli assassination of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh because it believes Israel has been trying to lure it into a regional war.
Pezeshkian, a reformist who was elected unexpectedly three months ago, was speaking at a wide-ranging and unprecedented two-and-half-hour press conference in which nearly half of the questions were from foreign media.
“What Israel has done in the region and what Israel tried with the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran was to drag us into a regional war,” he told reporters. “We have exercised restraint so far but we reserve the right to defend ourselves at a specific time and place with specific methods.”
It remains a matter of debate whether Pezeshkian, who has a frank, consensual style, has access to the real levers of power or the political will to transform Iran’s relations with the west. But his use of a large international platform and often unpretentious direct manner suggests he is a new and unpredictable element in Iranian politics.
He did not rule out the possibility that Iran may have sold short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, saying no sale had occurred during his presidency but he could not speak for whatever had been agreed by his predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi. “This has not happened in our time. I won’t go into what happened in the past. It is a possibility. There is no prohibition,” he said.
Western intelligence has said the contract was signed last August and the shipment occurred last week. The supply of missiles was seen as a blow to Pezeshkian’s hopes of improved relations between Iran and the west.
Under questioning he denied that Iran had sent any missiles to Houthi rebels in Yemen, after the claimed firing of a hypersonic missile at Israel on Sunday. Pezeshkian said it was hard enough for people to get to Yemen from Iran and asked how a missile could go to Yemen unseen.
He conceded that Iran had hypersonic missiles, but he said not of the kind fired by the Houthis on Sunday. “We don’t have this missile in Iran at all,” he said.
At one point, when asked by a female reporter why she still needed to change her walking route including using back alleys to avoid “morality police”, Pezeshkian replied: “Are the morality police still bothering you? That is not supposed to be happening. We will follow up so that they don’t bother anyone any more.”
On the future of Iran’s nuclear commitments and its enrichment of uranium at a level of 60% purity, he said Iran would not seek nuclear weapons but he accused the US of tearing up the old nuclear agreement. “The Americans have closed all the roads for us, everyone we want to talk to, the Americans say they will not allow it,” he said. Iranian officials have said they will explore talks on the future of the nuclear deal on the sidelines of the UN general assembly next week.
Pezeshkian said that if Iran sought better relations with the west it did not mean it would forget its friends, including Russia and China. “We have and will have relations with Russia but our view in all wars is that no country should encroach the territory of another,” he said. At the same time, he said Nato should not have come so close to Russia’s border.
He said Iran’s need for growth required it to remove itself from the blacklist of the Financial Action Task Force, the global body that decides whether countries meet standards on money laundering and corruption. “We have no choice but to solve the FATF issues,” he said.