Tweet by ‘Rouhani’ causes uproar

A Twitter account in the name of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani caused an uproar in Israel on Friday with a tweeted warning to the P5+1 nations in Geneva not to take Israel’s input into account when negotiating a nuclear agreement with Tehran.

“[P]5+1 group must make decisions independent from Israel because Israel merely seeks its own interests & not their interests,” tweeted @drRouhani, a Twitter user who identifies himself as “Dr. Hassan Rouhani.”

https://twitter.com/drRouhani/status/403885428899446784

The tweet was widely reported in Israel on Friday, with leading media outlets quoting it as a statement made by Rouhani himself in the midst of heated negotiations with the West over his country’s nuclear program.

However, it is highly unlikely that the account is Rouhani’s own.

The matter of Rouhani’s Twitter presence has been a cause for speculation in recent months, as it has yet to be confirmed that he operates an official Twitter account at all.

Last week, @drRouhani unleashed a bizarre but amusing set of informative tweets about world leaders at age 20.

Using the hashtag Presidentat20, the account of @DrRouhani tweeted about US President Barack Obama: “Obama was continuing his education at university at 20. He is said to have been on alcohol and Marijuana then!”

In 2006, two years before he was elected president, Obama famously said of his smoking days: ” When I was a kid, I inhaled. That was the point.”

About Russian President Vladimir Putin, the account wrote that at age 20, he was working for “Russian security agencies.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was honored with a tweet in which she was initially referred to in the masculine: “Angela_Merkel got his degree at the age of 20 while she was working as a waitress, too.”

The account preceded the set of tweets by asking if followers (over 25,000) knew “what the great presidents of the world had been doing at the age of 20? coming soon…”

The account in the Iranian president’s name seemed to be going through the list of leaders heading the P5+1 negotiations with Tehran over its controversial nuclear program, which are set to resume Saturday.

It is unlikely this account is really used by the Iranian president, although it has tweeted statements by Rouhani and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and has information and news from Iran.

Another account in the name of the president, @HassanRouhani, has significantly more followers (over 128,000) and was the account used to issue the famous well-wishing Rosh Hashanah greeting in September this year, after which a top adviser to the president denied that Rouhani even had a Twitter account.

However, the statements and information in that account have often been cited by media organizations as being reliable and verifiable.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.