Iran Confirms Ongoing Diplomatic Dialogue with US
Iran’s foreign minister revealed on Saturday that his government and the United States have been in direct communication since the Israel-Hamas war erupted in early October.
Speaking through a translator at a press conference in Beirut, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian publicly disclosed that “during this war and in the recent weeks, there was an exchange of messages between Iran and America.”
The US allegedly petitioned Tehran to reign in Lebanese Hizbullah’s military activity against Israel, requesting the Islamic Republic ask its proxy to “not get widely, fully involved in this war,” Amir-Abdollahian said.
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Israel and Hizbullah have traded cross-border fire on a near daily basis since Israel launched its massive ongoing ground, air, and naval campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas’s surprise violent incursion into southern Israel on October 7.
Heightened tension and inflamed rhetoric have since captured the political leadership in both Jerusalem and Beirut, with the assassination of deputy Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in the Lebanese capital via an alleged Israeli air strike in early January only amplifying domestic calls for all-out war.
Hizbullah has publicly vowed to “fight to the end” in response to an Israeli invasion.
Both considered key partners in Iran’s network of anti-Western insurgent groups, often referred to as the “Axis of Resistance,” Lebanon’s Hizbullah and the Gaza-based Hamas are ideologically aligned, but the former has so far hesitated to fully plunge itself into the conflict.
Over the past month, violence continued to spread throughout the region, with the US leading strikes against the Yemeni Houthi rebels and pro-Iran militias in Iraq and Syria, but diplomatic efforts spearheaded by the US, France, and the Lebanese government to prevent a full-scale war in Lebanon have so far been successful.
Amir-Abdollahian, who during the one-day visit met with Lebanon’s interim prime minister, foreign minister, speaker of parliament, and Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah, told the press that “Iran and Lebanon confirm that war is not the solution and that we absolutely never sought to expand it.” The Iranian diplomat also warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against escalating the conflict in Lebanon, saying that Iran sees ending the war in Gaza as the only lasting political solution to the crisis.
