Iran foreign minister says messages have been exchanged with US in recent weeks

BEIRUT - Iran and the United States have exchanged messages throughout Israel’s four-month-old war on Hamas in Gaza, including about Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, the Iranian foreign minister said on Feb 10.

“During this war and in the recent weeks, there was an exchange of messages between Iran and America,” Mr Hossein Amirabdollahian said through a translator at a press conference capping a day-long visit to Beirut.

He said Washington had asked Teheran to request Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, “not to get widely, fully involved in this war against” Israel.

Hezbollah has exchanged near-daily fire with the Israeli military along the Lebanese-Israeli frontier to support its Palestinian ally Hamas, and has vowed to “fight to the end” should Israel launch a full-scale war on Lebanon.

Israel launched a war that it says is aimed at destroying Hamas, after the armed group

launched an attack on southern Israel on Oct 7.

The conflict has rippled across the region and, earlier in February,

Washington staged strikes against Iran-aligned groups in Iraq, Syria

and Yemen in retaliation for a deadly attack on US troops in Jordan.

Mr Amirabdollahian on Feb 10 warned Israel against taking any steps towards a broader war against Lebanon, saying that would be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “last day”.

He also said Iran saw a political solution as the only way to end the Gaza war.

“Iran and Lebanon confirm that war is not the solution, and that we absolutely never sought to expand it,” Mr Amirabdollahian told a news conference earlier on Feb 10 alongside his Lebanese counterpart, Mr Abdallah Bou Habib.

He also said Teheran was in talks with Saudi Arabia on a political solution to hostilities in Gaza.

Hamas this week proposed a ceasefire of 4½ months,

during which remaining hostages held by the group would go free, Israel would withdraw its troops from Gaza, and agreement would be reached on an end to the war.

Mr Netanyahu called the Hamas terms “delusional” and vowed to fight on. But Mr Amirabdollahian said Hamas was presenting ideas based on a “realistic view”, and that they should be widely backed in order to end the war.

On Feb 10, he met Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati, foreign minister Habib and Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri, as well as Hezbollah head Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television outlet said the foreign minister and Mr Nasrallah reviewed the latest developments in Gaza and southern Lebanon, including “the near future of the situation in Lebanon”.

Mr Amirabdollahian is set to travel to Syria, according to Syrian media, and will meet top officials there.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has suffered one of its most bruising spells in Syria since arriving a decade ago to aid President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war.

Since last December, Israeli strikes have killed more than half a dozen of its members, among them one of the Guards’ top intelligence generals. REUTERS