Trump’s vile remarks stem from mental imbalance: Iranian official

Pezeshkian rejected the allegations in sweeping terms, turning the blame on Washington and its allies.

“Did we kill sixty thousand women and children in Gaza within a year, under bombs and missiles? Did we cut off water, bread, and medicine from those poor people? Are we the threat?” he asked in a speech in Kermanshah in western Iran.

Referring to US arms sales to Iran's Arab neighbors, Pezeshkian said, “When they boast of having missiles and bombs beyond imagination, is it us who are causing war and bloodshed—or is it them, who flood this region with weapons and ammunition?”

“You want the countries of this region to turn on each other by handing out bombs and missiles, and then you say you are peace-seekers?” he added.

Soleimani killing

Pezeshkian also reminded Trump that he was the one who ordered the killing of Iran's top military commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020, saying, "Soleimani was the man who stood against ISIS—the same ISIS you trained, supported, and nurtured. And now you claim you defeated them?”

Iranian officialdom had seethed at Trump for years after Soleimani's assassination, and the US Justice Department in November unsealed murder-for-hire charges against an Afghan national it said was tasked by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with killing Trump.

However, the issue of avenging Soleimani's killing had been somewhat dulled down in recent months amid Trump's renewed campaign of 'maximum pressure' and calls to make a fresh nuclear deal.

“If they martyr our great figures, hundreds more will rise from this land to build this nation," Pezeshkian said.

Responding directly to Trump’s comments about Iran’s internal struggles, Pezeshkian said, “Trump is doing everything he can to sow seeds of division, despair and conflict among the Iranian people. He can only dream of that. All Iranians will stand up for their country with all their might.”

On Iran’s domestic resilience, the president said the Islamic Republic had withstood more than four decades of pressure. “For 47 years, they’ve used all their power to try to bring this system and this people to their knees—and they couldn’t. And they won’t be able to.”

"The kind of pressure they’ve put on Iran—if it had been put on any other country, it wouldn’t have lasted 24 hours.”

His comments came one day after Trump's sharp criticism of Iran's leadership in a lengthy speech in Saudi Arabia.

"Iran's decades of neglect and mismanagement have left the country plagued by rolling blackouts lasting for hours a day ... While your skill has turned dry deserts into fertile farmland, Iran's leaders have managed to turn green farmland into dry deserts as their corrupt water mafia ... causes droughts and empty river beds. They get rich," the US president said.

"It's their decision, because we want to see Iran do well and thrive and be successful and everybody be happy," US President Donald Trump said at a state dinner in Doha alongside Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani. "We want to have this end peacefully, not horribly."

"We're going to try and get it done. They have to move quickly ... in a certain sense, I guess I'm a good friend (to Iran), because a lot of people would rather have me take a much more harsh road. But I know that if we can avoid that road, that would be a great thing."

Trump addressed the Qatari emir and said, “I hope you can help me with the Iran situation. It’s a perilous situation, and we want to do the right thing."

"We want to do it something that's going to save maybe millions of lives. Because things like that get started and they get out of control. I've seen it over and over again. They go to war and things get out of control, and we're not going to let that happen.”

Alarge bloc of Congressional Republicans is urging US President Donald Trump to maintain a hardline stance on Iran, calling in an open letter signed by more than 200 lawmakers for the complete dismantling of Iran's uranium enrichment technology.

All Republican senators except one, along with 177 GOP representatives, signed the letter warning against any agreement resembling the 2015 nuclear deal brokered under former President Barack Obama.

That accord, they argued, merely delayed Iran’s nuclear ambitions while allowing it to continue enrichment activities under international oversight.

“The United States cannot afford another deal that gives Iran room to maneuver,” the lawmakers wrote. “The regime must be stripped of all enrichment capacity — even for peaceful energy purposes.”

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Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian delivered a fiery response on Wednesday to his American counterpart’s speech in Riyadh the previous day in which Donald Trump accused Iran’s leaders of mismanagement and destabilizing the Middle East.

Pezeshkian rejected the allegations in sweeping terms, turning the blame on Washington and its allies.

“Did we kill sixty thousand women and children in Gaza within a year, under bombs and missiles? Did we cut off water, bread, and medicine from those poor people? Are we the threat?” he asked in a speech in Kermanshah in western Iran.

Referring to US arms sales to Iran's Arab neighbors, Pezeshkian said, “When they boast of having missiles and bombs beyond imagination, is it us who are causing war and bloodshed—or is it them, who flood this region with weapons and ammunition?”

“You want the countries of this region to turn on each other by handing out bombs and missiles, and then you say you’re peace-seekers?” he added.

Iran's foreign ministry spokesman accused US President Donald Trump of seeking to destabilize regional ties after he delivered a sharply critical speech in Riyadh on Tuesday.

"The presence of a US official in our region making false accusations against the Iranian people can only be interpreted as a sign of his ill intent toward both the Iranian people and regional relations,” Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said in an interview with Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.

In his speech, Trump pilloried Iran's leadership and praised those of its Arab neighbors.

"(It) was a deliberate move to sow division between Iran and the countries of the region,” Baghaei said.