In a defiant speech at the United Nations General Assembly, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian has delivered a sharp rebuke to a threat by US President Donald Trump from the same rostrum the previous day to annihilate the country, but left the door open for diplomacy to end nearly seven months of war. During his speech, Pezeshkian held up a picture of former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – assassinated in a joint US-Israeli strike at the start of the war in February – as well as photos of schoolgirls killed in an alleged US air attack on their school in the southern city of Minab. As the Iranian president began his speech, an official from the US delegation walked out of the vast hall.
The Israeli delegation also boycotted the address. But Pezeshkian, a relative centrist in the Iranian ruling system, also left the door open for negotiations, saying, “Iran extends its hands towards the world.” “We invite the world and call to it, not out of weakness, but out of a deep belief in our own power and steadfastness to cooperate and collaborate out of a deep understanding that no one in this region will have security alone,” he said. On Tuesday, Trump said his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, who are both leading negotiations with Tehran, had held a three-hour meeting with Iranian officials.
Trump later said talks were continuing and that he believed a settlement would eventually be reached. The remarks came after Trump used his speech before UN delegates to again threaten Iran’s destruction. Negar Mortazavi, a senior fellow at the US-based Center for International Policy, said the Iranian president’s speech showed usual flashes of defiance, but notably signalled an appetite for a diplomatic off-ramp.
They’ve kept the door to diplomacy open,” she told Al Jazeera. The memorandum, which has expired, called for a halt to fighting, lifting the US naval blockade and opening the Strait of Hormuz to maritime traffic. Drawing parallels between the US and Israel bombing of Iran and Israel’s attacks in Gaza, Pezeskhian said Israel’s genocide in Gaza “revealed the double standards to which Iran is held by the international community”.
Joey Hood, a former US diplomat and ambassador to Tunisia, said the speech leaned heavily into familiar Iranian official rhetoric and represented a lost opportunity to seek compromise. The Iranian president didn’t do any of that,” Hood said.
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