TORONTO — Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told the United Nations General Assembly that Iran will negotiate with Washington but will not accept “the language of force,” a day after U.S. President Donald Trump attacked the Islamic Republic from the same stage.Pezeshkian said Trump’s remarks about Iran ran against the UN Charter. Sanctions, pressure and “bullying,” he said, will only increase Iranian resistance. “We will never bow our heads or bend the knee,” he told the assembly, then added that Tehran is ready for “dialog and diplomacy and negotiations without accepting the language of force.”The nuclear file was the other hard line. Pezeshkian said Iran wants no nuclear weapons and will not accept limits on what he called peaceful nuclear technology for medicine, agriculture, industry and electricity. That technology, he said, is an inherent right, not a privilege “at the exclusive disposal of a handful.” Inspectors, he argued, are sent to Iran while Israel sits outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty, holds nuclear weapons, and has never allowed an inspection.He used that contrast as the speech’s political core. “The nuclear weapon is in Israel, but the inspectors in Iran. Israel kills, but Iran is subject to sanctions.” He said Israel had “murdered savagely over 70 thousand innocents in Gaza,” a figure that independent tallies still treat as contested. Sanctions, he said, fall on the sick and the poor, not on the people who designed them..On war, Pezeshkian said Iran’s defences exist so no one thinks bombing Iranian cities will go unanswered, that Iran did not start a war, and that those who attacked it have already “tested” its steadfastness. “Iran cannot be made to surrender.” He said regional problems should be solved by regional states, objected to outside powers using a waterway while arming the states around it, and said lasting peace in West Asia is “impossible without justice for Palestine.”Resistance, he warned, will reappear in another form if it is crushed.The offer at the end was the same as the warning at the start. No country in the region will have security alone, he said. Either they build it together, or they live under insecurity together.
