New Iran nuclear talks to be held in Geneva

US negotiators will meet in the coming days in Geneva with their Iranian counterparts for a new round of talks on reining in Iran’s nuclear program, American officials said Wednesday.

Chief negotiator Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and her team will travel to Switzerland on Thursday, the State Department announced.

Iran and the P5+1 group — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States — are trying to pin down a complex deal that would put back Iran’s ability to develop an atomic bomb in exchange for an easing of crippling international sanctions.

“These bilateral consultations will take place in the context of the P5+1 nuclear negotiations with Iran,” the State Department said in a statement, adding the European Union’s deputy foreign policy chief Helga Schmid would also join the talks.

Two deadlines for a permanent agreement were missed since a November 2013 interim deal.

Disagreements in the talks center on the extent of nuclear activities Iran will be allowed to continue and the timetable for the lifting of sanctions imposed on Tehran over its nuclear efforts.

Negotiators are now working toward reaching a political framework by March 31, with the final technical details to be laid out in a comprehensive accord by June 30.

It was not immediately clear who would meet with Sherman in Geneva, but in the past she has huddled with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

The Iranian FM has also met multiple times with top US diplomat John Kerry mostly in European capitals. Their last face-to-face was in Munich earlier this month, when they met twice on different days on the sidelines of a global security conference. Both men stressed that they were focused on the March 31 deadline and appeared to rule out any further extensions.

Western powers accuse Iran of seeking to develop a nuclear weapon — a charge Tehran denies.

Israel has been especially vocal in its opposition to a bad deal with Iran, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set to address a joint session of Congress on the issue next month, a move that — when announced — infuriated the White House which charged it was a breach of protocol.

Netanyahu’s opposition to an agreement have grown over what he believes to be extreme concessions made to Iran that would leave it as a threshold nuclear weapons power and a direct threat to Israel’s existence.

The US, meanwhile, confirmed reports Wednesday that it was withholding from Israel sensitive details about talks with Tehran.

The White House and State Department said Wednesday they were not sharing everything from the negotiations with the Israelis and complained that Israeli officials had misrepresented what they had been told in the past.

Senior US officials privately blamed Netanyahu himself for “changing the dynamic” of previously robust information-sharing by politicizing it.

AP contributed to this report.