Iranian President-elect Masoud Pezeshkian spoke on Monday with Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas terrorist movement’s political bureau, the Tehran regime’s state media reported.
Haniyeh “expressed gratitude towards the Islamic Republic of Iran over its support for the Palestinian cause and called for stepped-up diplomatic efforts to end the Israeli regime’s aggression against Gaza,” according to the IRNA news agency.
For his part, “The Iranian president-elect stressed that his country will never stop backing the Palestinian people at these difficult times.”
Pezeshkian on Sunday praised Iran’s Yemeni terrorist proxy the Houthis “for their courageous measures to support the Palestinians in war-ravaged Gaza, in reference to Yemen’s months-long military operations targeting Israel-linked ships in the high seas over its war in the besieged territory,” IRNA reported.
He made the comments during a phone call with Houthi military leader Mahdi al-Masha, chairman of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council.
Last week, Pezeshkian reaffirmed Tehran’s dedication to destroying Israel, saying its proxies across the region will not allow the Jewish state’s “criminal policies” to continue.
“The Islamic Republic has always supported the resistance of the people of the region against the illegitimate Zionist regime. The support of the resistance is rooted in the fundamental policies of the Islamic Republic,” Pezeshkian wrote to Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.
“I am certain that the resistance movements in the region will not allow this regime to continue its warmongering and criminal policies against the oppressed people of Palestine and other nations of the region,” Iranian media quoted the supposed reformer president as saying.
His comments came on July 8, two days after Nasrallah congratulated Pezeshkian on his “blessed” election victory, noting Tehran’s ongoing support for “resistance” groups.
“We in Hezbollah and in all the resistance groups in the region … always look to the Islamic Republic of Iran as a strong, stable and permanent support,” the letter read, according to Agence France-Presse.
Pezeshkian won Iran’s second-round presidential vote on July 5, receiving more than 16 million votes compared to former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili’s more than 13 million.
Pezeshkian, a former heart surgeon and longtime lawmaker born in 1954 to an Iranian Azerbaijani father and an Iranian Kurdish mother, told local media ahead of his election win that if he were elected, he would “try to have friendly relations with all countries except Israel.”
Pezeshkian stressed during the campaign that he fully adheres to the Islamic regime’s policies and has “melted into Khamenei’s leadership.”
Pezeshkian’s election is not expected to produce any major policy shift in Tehran’s nuclear program or support for Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, or various militias in Iraq and Syria.
