The Israeli leader has worked since the 1980s to convince every US president that Tehran wants to create atomic weapons, Masoud Pezeshkian said

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent decades trying to deceive US presidents into believing that Tehran is seeking to create nuclear weapons, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has charged.

In an interview with conservative American journalist Tucker Carlson aired on Monday, Pezeshkian accused Netanyahu of pushing this narrative long before he first became prime minister in 1996. "It was Netanyahu since 1984 who has created this false mentality that Iran seeks a nuclear bomb," he said, referring to Netanyahu's role as Israel's envoy to the UN at the time.

"He has put it in the minds of every US president since then... [that] we would like to have a nuclear bomb," he noted, stressing that Iran has never been developing such a weapon. "This is in contrast to the religious decree... issued by Iran's supreme leader," Pezeshkian added. He also noted that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had confirmed that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons.

Pezeshkian also accused Israel of deliberately sabotaging negotiations with the US on Iran's nuclear program when West Jerusalem unleashed a powerful strike on Tehran's nuclear infrastructure, military sites, and top commanders on June 13.

"We were right in the middle of holding talks with the US... we were told that as long as we don't give permission to Israel, they are not going to attack you," he said. "But suddenly Israel torpedoed the negotiating table... they totally ruined and destroyed diplomacy."

The Iranian president confirmed that Iran was open to discussing supervision of its nuclear program. However, he argued that recent attacks on Iranian nuclear sites made monitoring virtually impossible for the time being. "We don't have any access to them [nuclear sites]. We have to wait and see how much they have been damaged."

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Israel has long accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, with Netanyahu famously brandishing a cartoon bomb diagram at the UN in 2012 to illustrate what he called Tehran's progress toward a nuclear weapon. Israel also opposed the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, from which the US later withdrew under President Donald Trump.

Before the 12-day war last month, the US and Iran were holding talks during which Washington demanded that Tehran abandon all uranium enrichment. Iran dismissed the demand, noting that enriched uranium is necessary to fuel its civilian nuclear energy program.