A senior Iranian lawmaker on Sunday urged Western countries to refrain from delays in reaching a nuclear agreement, warning that otherwise, Iran would consider "other options", the Xinhua news agency reported.
Mahmoud Abbaszadeh Meshkini, a member of the Iranian Parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, was quoted as having told the official IRNA news agency that a win-win agreement is important for securing Iran's national interests.
"The Westerners need negotiations more than Iran ... if the Western side does not make an agreement, we have other options on the table, and Iran's hands are not empty in this regard," he noted.
"Any agreement that deprives and limits Iran of the desired privileges will not be accepted by the Iranian nation," he added.
In response to the question about safeguard issues, Meshkini said that solving the safeguards issues can "repair the damaged wall of trust between Iran and the West."
The comments come several days after Iran announced it had submitted its comments to the US response to the European Union’s draft for reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
A spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Nasser Kanaani, said that Iran’s response was prepared based on a constructive approach.
A senior Biden administration official told Politico after Iran submitted its response on Thursday, “We are studying Iran’s response, but the bottom line is that it is not at all encouraging.”
The official declined to give specifics about what the Iranians had proposed, but added, “based on their answer, we appear to be moving backwards.”
On Friday, a senior European official directly involved in nuclear talks with Iran told Axios’ Barak Ravid that Iran’s latest response to the EU’s proposal is unreasonable and indicates that the Iranians are not interested in closing a deal.
"The Iranian response was totally unreasonable. It reopens the EU coordinator’s text on nuclear safeguards, which was at the outer limits of our flexibility already - and which the Iranians implicitly accepted in their August 15 response," the official said.
The European official stressed to Ravid, "The Iranian response can only be read as they do not want to close this deal - when we were so close, for the first time in 18 months."
Iran has scaled back its compliance with the 2015 deal ever since former US President Donald Trump withdrew from it in 2018.
Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that Iran has begun enriching uranium with the second of three cascades, or clusters, of advanced IR-6 centrifuges recently installed at its underground plant at Natanz.
The report, released on Wednesday, followed a report released by the IAEA two days earlier which indicated that the first cascade had been brought onstream.