Pezeshkian vows Iran will ‘never bow before aggressors’ as snapback sanctions loom

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian vows to “never bow before aggressors” as it faces snapback sanctions over its nuclear program, and months after Israel targeted its nuclear facilities.

He denounces the “aerial assaults of the Zionist regime and the United States of America against Iran’s cities, homes and infrastructures precisely at a time when we were treading the path of diplomatic negotiations,” adding that it “constituted a grave betrayal of diplomacy and a subversion of efforts towards the establishment of stability and peace.”

“This brazen act of aggression, in addition to monitoring a number of commanders, citizens, children, women, scientists and intellectual elites of my country, inflicted a grievous blow upon international trust and the very prospect of peace in the region. Should we fail to confront such perilous breaches of international norms?”

Pezeshkian repeatedly accuses Israel of “genocide” in the Gaza Strip, accusing Israel of killing “at the very least, over 35,000 innocent civilians in Gaza.”

It is unclear where his figure comes from. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 65,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters.

Israel says it has killed over 22,000 combatants in battle as of August and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 onslaught.

“We do not seek nuclear weapons. This is our belief, based on the edict issued by the supreme leader and by religious authorities,” Pezeshkian asserts, although it avowedly seeks Israel’s destruction, built multiple heavily protected nuclear facilities, enriched uranium to levels with no civilian application, worked on weaponization, and developed a large ballistic missile arsenal.

Pezeshkian describes “the ludicrous and delusional scheme of a Greater Israel is being proclaimed with brazenness by the highest echelons of that regime.”

“The scheme encompasses vast swaths of the region. The map itself lays bare the true intentions of the Zionist regime, intentions that have of late been openly endorsed by its criminal prime minister,” he states.

“None in the world is secure from the aggressive machinations of this regime. It is manifest that the Zionist regime and its sponsors no longer even content themselves with normalization through political means. Rather, they impose their presence through naked force and have styled it peace through strength. Yet this is neither peace nor power. It is nothing but aggression, rooted in coercion and bullying,” he says.

Iran has used proxy terror groups throughout the Middle East to expand its influence, including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza — groups that are all sworn to the destruction of Israel, and have instigated attacks on the Jewish state over the past two years, drawing IDF responses.