Iran's president calls Israel warmonger

Iran's new president on Monday accused Israel of seeking regional war, as he attempted to cast Tehran as restrained and appealed to the West for talks on flashpoint issues.

President Masoud Pezeshkian, inaugurated in late July as a reformist within the cleric-run state, was visiting the United Nations as Israel steps up strikes in Lebanon on the Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah, following a wave of explosions on handheld communication devices.

"We know more than anyone else that if a larger war were to erupt in the Middle East, it will not benefit anyone throughout the world. It is Israel that seeks to create this wider conflict," Pezeshkian told a roundtable with journalists in New York.

Pezeshkian - whose hardline predecessor died in a helicopter crash - took office with calls for a better relationship with the West.

But tensions immediately soared as the visiting political chief of Hamas, the Palestinian militants who attacked Israel on October 7 last year, was assassinated in an operation in Tehran widely attributed to Israel.

Pezeshkian alluded to appeals from the West for Iran not to retaliate so as not to jeopardize US efforts for a ceasefire in the Gaza war.

"We tried to not respond. They kept telling us we are within reach of peace, perhaps in a week or so," he said.

"But we never reached that elusive peace. Every day Israel is committing more atrocities and killing more and more people - old, young, men, women, children, hospitals, other facilities," he said.

He did not reply directly when asked if Iran would now respond more directly to Israel. "We always keep hearing, well, Hezbollah fired a rocket. If Hezbollah didn't even do that minimum, who would defend them?" he said.

"Curiously enough, we keep being labeled as the perpetrator of insecurity. But look at the situation for where it is."

Iran openly backs Hamas, whose October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity. Israel's retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,455 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory's health ministry. The UN has described the figures as reliable.

Pezeshkian accused Western powers of double standards by saying that violence "by one side is legitimate self-defense but it's terrorism and murder by the other." AFP