Arizona Tribune - Iran will never seek nuclear weapons, president tells UN

"I hereby declare once more before this assembly that Iran has never sought and will never seek to build a nuclear bomb," President Masoud Pezeshkian told the United Nations General Assembly.

"The one disturbing peace and stability in the region is Israel, but Iran is the one that gets punished," he said.

Iran has long contended that it is not seeking nuclear weapons, pointing to an edict by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and US intelligence has not concluded that the country has decided to build a nuclear weapon.

But Israel, the United States and European countries have long been skeptical due to the country's advanced nuclear work, believing it could quickly pursue a bomb if it so decided.

Britain, France and Germany have moved to reimpose UN sanctions that had been suspended under a 2015 nuclear deal that was negotiated by the United States and then torn up by US President Donald Trump.

The sanctions are set to go into effect on Saturday. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met Tuesday with his European counterparts, leading to no clear headway other than an agreement to keep talking.

Pezeshkian accused the Europeans of bad faith, saying that Iran's lack of cooperation was in response to Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

"They falsely presented themselves as parties of good standing to the agreement, and they disparaged Iran's sincere efforts as insufficient," Pezeshkian said.

"All of this was in pursuit of nothing less than the destruction of the very JCPOA which they themselves had once held as a foremost achievement."

Standing at the General Assembly rostrum, Pezeshkian showed pictures of people killed in the Israeli military campaign against Iran, which Tehran says killed more than 1,000 people.

"Aerial assaults of the Zionist regime and the United States of America against Iran's cities, homes and infrastructure at the very time we were treading the path of diplomatic negotiations constituted a grave betrayal of diplomacy," he said.

N.Mitchell--AT