Iran says it will continue nuclear talks with the U.S., shrugging off Trump’s threats

TEHRAN — Iran’s president said his country will continue talks with the United States over its rapidly advancing nuclear program but will not relinquish its rights because of U.S. threats.

“We are negotiating, and we will negotiate. We are not after war, but we do not fear any threat,” President Masoud Pezeshkian said during a speech to navy officials broadcast by state television Saturday.

“It is not [as if] if they threaten us, we will give up our human rights,” Pezeshkian said.

The negotiations have reached the “expert” level, meaning the sides are trying to reach agreement on the details of a possible deal. But a major sticking point remains Iran’s enrichment of uranium, which Tehran insists it must be allowed to do and the Trump administration increasingly insists the Islamic Republic must give up.

President Trump has repeatedly threatened to unleash airstrikes targeting Iran’s nuclear program if a deal isn’t reached. Iranian officials warn they could pursue a nuclear weapon with their stockpile of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade levels.

Trump said Friday that Iran received a proposal during the talks, though he did not elaborate.

During his trip to the region this week, Trump at nearly every event said Iran could not be allowed to obtain a nuclear bomb, something U.S. intelligence agencies assess Tehran is not actively pursuing, though its program is on the cusp of being able to weaponize nuclear material.

Mohammad Eslami, the head of Iran’s atomic organization, emphasized that the program is peaceful, saying it is under “continuous” monitoring by the United Nations nuclear watchdog, state TV reported Saturday.

“No country is monitored by the agency like us,” Eslami said. The International Atomic Energy Agency inspected Iran’s nuclear facilities more than 450 times in 2024, he said, which amounted to about a quarter of all IAEA inspections globally last year.

Meanwhile, Israel routinely has threatened to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities if it feels threatened, further complicating tensions in the Mideast stoked by the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

In his first reaction to Trump’s regional visit, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei criticized the U.S. president’s remarks about creating peace through power.

“Trump said that he wanted to use power for peace; he lied. He and the U.S. administration used power for massacre in Gaza, for waging wars in any place they could,” Khamenei said Saturday during a meeting with teachers that was broadcast on state television.

The U.S. has provided Israel with 10-ton bombs to “drop on Gaza children, hospitals, houses of people in Lebanon and anywhere else when they can,” he said.

Khamenei, who has the final say on all Iranian state matters, reiterated his nation’s long-standing animosity toward Israel. “Definitely, the Zionist regime is the spot of corruption, war, rifts. The Zionist regime that is lethal, dangerous, a cancerous tumor that should be certainly eradicated, and it will be,” he said.

He criticized U.S. policy toward Arab nations, under which they cannot thrive without U.S. support, he said.

“Surely this model has failed. With efforts of the regional nations, the U.S. should leave the region, and it will leave,” Khamenei said.

Iran has long considered the U.S. military presence in the region as a threat on its doorstep, especially after Trump pulled the U.S. out of a 2015 international nuclear deal with Iran in 2018 and reimposed crippling sanctions.