Iranian foreign minister briefly hospitalized, cancels meetings

TEHRAN, Iran — Iranian state media says the country’s foreign minister was briefly hospitalized due to an unspecified illness.

The state-run IRNA news agency cited a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying that Mohammad Javad Zarif was hospitalized for a few hours on Saturday and has canceled all his meetings on Saturday and Sunday so he can rest. The spokesman did not provide further details on his illness.

“Due to the continuation and severity of Mr. Zarif’s illness, which began yesterday and forced him to be hospitalized for several hours, and the need for his total rest prescribed by doctors, all the foreign minister’s planned schedules both on Saturday and Sunday have been cancelled,” Bahram Qasemi was quoted as saying.

Among the events Zarif was forced to cancel was a meeting with a senior Omani government official responsible for foreign affairs, who is visiting Tehran.

Zarif was the lead negotiator in the talks leading up to the 2015 nuclear accord with world powers. He was briefly hospitalized with back pain in October 2013.

He has twice in the last month traded barbs with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after Israel’s leader slammed the Islamic Republic for threatening the Jewish state.

Two weeks ago, Netanyahu vowed to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions and said it was a major cause of problems in the Middle East, in his speech at the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC’s annual policy conference in Washington.

Zarif responded hours later by threatening Israel’s existence, as he and other Iranian officials have done many times in the past.

“Despite Netanyahu’s claims, the fact is that illegal occupation lies at the heart of most of the calamities in our region,” he wrote on Twitter. “Historically, occupying another’s land has never been sustainable. This occupation, too — and the apartheid system that perpetuates it — will not last long.”

Last month, Netanyahu singled out Zarif in his speech at the Munich security conference, as he lifted up a piece of an Iranian drone downed in Israeli airspace.

“Mr. Zarif, do you recognize this? You should, it’s yours. You can take back with you a message to the tyrants of Tehran — do not test Israel’s resolve!” proclaimed Netanyahu to the audience, which included Zarif.

The drone, which entered northern Israel from Syria near the Jordan border on February 10, was shot down by an Israeli attack helicopter. In response to the incursion, Israeli jets attacked the mobile command center from which it was operated, the army said.

When Zarif spoke at the Munich conference later that day, he derided Netanyahu’s drone stunt as a “cartoonish circus” and said it “doesn’t deserve the dignity of a response.”