Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian stated on Thursday that the US is fully involved in the Gaza war while sending repeated messages of restraint to the rest of the region.
Amir-Abdollahian was speaking at a UN meeting in Geneva alongside his counterparts from other Middle Eastern countries.
He warned on the first day of the Global Refugee Forum on Wednesday that Israel would not be able to continue to fight for “even an hour without US support” and unless immediate action is taken to end "the savage attacks by the apartheid regime of Israel" on the Gaza population, the conflict would spread to other parts of the region.
But in keeping with the Islamic regime’s strategy of avoiding responsibility, he said on Thursday during the same summit that Iran has no interest in expanding the conflict and pinned the blame on US involvement in the war.
Iranian officials have referred to Hamas's attack on numerous Israeli targets on October 7 as a purely “Palestinian operation” and denied any involvement. During the offensive more than 1,000 civilians in Israel were killed and more than 240 were taken hostage.
But at the same time the so-called "Resistance Axis", a military alliance sponsored by Iran, has launched around 90 attacks against US bases in Syria and Iraq since the beginning of the war. In addition, Tehran-backed Houthis in Yemen continued to attack commercial ships in the Red Sea following a speech by Iran's leader.
Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi was scheduled to participate in the UN Global Refugee Forum, but instead, the Iranian delegation was led by Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian after a legal complaint was filed on Monday asking Swiss authorities to arrest Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi if he traveled to Geneva.
The complaint was filed by three former Iranian political prisoners who escaped the Islamic Republic's 1988 prison massacres.
On Tuesday, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Narges Mohammadi, in a letter to the Swedish Prime Minister, highlighted Raisi's role in the “Death Committee”, which oversaw summary executions of approximately two thousand political prisoners during the 1980s.