Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told Tucker Carlson in an interview released on Monday that the US said it wouldn’t give permission to Israel to launch an attack on Iran during recent negotiations.
“We were told during the process of these negotiations and talks that as long as we (the US) don’t give permission to Israel, they’re not going to attack you, and we were going to have the next round of talks very soon, but suddenly, in the middle of it, Israel torpedoed the negotiating table,” Pezeshkian told Carlson through an interpreter.
Israel launched its war on Iran with airstrikes on June 13, two days before the US and Iran were set to hold another round of negotiations. Pezeshkian’s comments align with recent reporting that said the US and Israel engaged in a deception campaign ahead of the attack to keep Tehran off guard.
Just hours before Israel’s initial strikes on Iran, President Trump claimed in a post on Truth Social that he was still committed to a diplomatic solution with Iran. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, the first Israeli warplanes were already in the air when Trump made the post.
The Journal report said that key to the deception was the idea “implanted in the minds of the Iranians that Israel wouldn’t strike without US authorization and participation” and that “as long as the US wasn’t mobilizing its forces and was engaged in negotiations, Israel could threaten to attack and even mobilize its troops in plain sight of Iran without giving away the element of surprise.”
Pezeshkian said that Iran was willing to restart negotiations with the US, but it needed assurances that an attack wouldn’t occur during the next round of talks. “I’m of the belief that we could very much, easily resolve the differences and conflicts with the United States through dialogue and talks,” the Iranian leader said. “There’s a condition for restarting the talks: how are we going to trust the United States again?”
Pezeshkian also alleged that Israel tried to assassinate him during the 12-Day War. “I was in a meeting… but thanks to the intelligence that the spies had, they tried to bombard the area in which we were holding that meeting,” he said.
The Iranian leader said that Tehran was still committed to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons. He said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has put it in the “minds” of US presidents that Tehran would like to have a nuclear bomb.
“This is wrong, and this is in contrast to the religious decree or fatwa issued by his eminence, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. So it is religiously forbidden for us to go after a nuclear bomb,” Pezeshkian said.
