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Iran’s foreign minister: Nuclear deal ‘will never be renegotiated’

Javad Zarif warns President-elect Biden against continuing Trump’s “rogue regime.”

By Paul Shindman, World Israel News

Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said Thursday that Iran will never renegotiate the 2015 nuclear deal that the United States pulled out of, sending a clear message to the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden.

“We will not renegotiate a deal which we [already] negotiated,” Zarif said during a video conference with the European Council on Foreign Relations. “This was the subject of two years of negotiations.”

“It will never be renegotiated, period,” Zarif said, “because that’s a sign [of] a clear case of bad faith.”

Zarif said the issue of Iran’s ballistic missile program was purposefully left out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal, and Iran was not willing to talk about the issue or make any other changes to something that had already been agreed upon.

The veteran Iranian minister then attacked Western countries for what he called their support of “Israeli terrorism,” alleging that Israel was behind the assassination last week of Iran’s top nuclear scientist.

Zarif also slammed the West and called on the U.S. and its European allies to “stop its malign behavior in our region,” referring to forces fighting the Iran-backed Houti rebels in the Yemen civil war.

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He singled out the U.S. for supporting “the dismemberment of a journalist in Turkey by their very close ally, Saudi Arabia.”

Although Iran has been recognized by most major human rights organizations as one of the world’s most oppressive regimes, Zarif said that only if the West backed down can they “start talking about other things.”

“As long as they are not able to put up, they have to shut up,” Zarif said.

The minister also rejected the idea of a Biden Administration trying to continue any anti-Iran policies put in place by President Donald Trump, saying that the “Trump administration has been a rogue regime.”