Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on Thursday accused Israel of “taking control” of United States policy, thus preventing a revival of the 2015 nuclear deal.
“We have intelligence that the Zionist regime has taken the foreign policy of the US hostage,” Amir-Abdollahian said in an interview he gave CNN’s Fareed Zakaria at the World Economic Forum in Davos, according to JPost.
“If the American side will decide realistically, then the deal is at hand,” he added.
The Iranian Foreign Minister said Israel over-dramatized the US decision to keep the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on its Foreign Terror Organizations list, claiming that retaining the IRGC on that list is not significant for the future of the talks.
“The FTO thing is just one level of our talks between us and the Americans, indirectly,” he said. “There are still remaining issues which are also important. Unfortunately, the Israeli side made it [the FTO issue] public, magnified it, and now this issue is being portrayed as the main hurdle.”
The comments come as efforts to revive the 2015 nuclear deal continue to stall.
Iran scaled back its compliance with the 2015 deal, in response to former US President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement in May of 2018, but has held several rounds of indirect talks with the US on a return to the agreement.
Negotiations nearly reached completion in March before running into problems and ending abruptly.
On Wednesday, US Special Envoy for Iran Rob Malley told lawmakers that the prospects for reaching a deal with Iran are “tenuous” at best.
Speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Malley said the United States is ready to tighten sanctions and act with Israel and others to counter the Iranian threat if efforts to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal fail.
"We do not have a deal ... and prospects for reaching one are, at best, tenuous," said the envoy.
Amir-Abdollahian said on Thursday that private messages Iran indirectly receives from Malley and Biden are different from their public statements, which could be political in nature.
“The window for diplomacy was still open as long as sanctions were lifted and the Iranian public was convinced that it would receive economic relief,” he said, adding, “Give us economic guarantees and remove the elements of the maximum pressure policy of Trump. These are the most important issues to us that we have to focus on.”