AhlulBayt News Agency: The US’s regional envoy and representative to underway indirect talks with Iran reportedly met with one of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest confidantes as well as the Israeli regime’s spy chief, ahead of the fifth round of the talks.
Barak Ravid, a reporter for the American news website Axios, addressed the development in a post on the X social media platform on Friday, the day that witnessed taking place of the fifth round in Rome.
The remarks came amid ongoing close political, diplomatic, and intelligence coordination between the United States and the Israeli regime, a relationship that American officials have openly acknowledged on numerous occasions.
According to Ravid, before the talks were to go underway in the Italian capital, the American envoy Steve Witkoff met with the Israeli regime’s so-called strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer, who is also an American politician and used to be the regime’s long-term ambassador to Washington.
Witkoff also met with the Mossad spy agency’s director, David Barnea, in the city, Ravid added.
It remains unclear whether the three met together during one session or separately on different occasions.
According to Axios, the Israeli duo had been seeking to coordinate positions with Witkoff. The two would also seek to be briefed immediately after the talks wrapped up, the website added.
The Israeli officials had reportedly traveled to Rome specifically to meet with Witkoff.
Tel Aviv has repeatedly called for total elimination of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear energy facilities. American officials, including President Donald Trump and Witkoff himself, have echoed the demand.
Earlier this month, Trump said there were only two possible outcomes, namely “blowing them (the facilities) up nicely or blow them up viciously.”
Speaking to Press TV on Thursday, an informed political source said that the US was "politically" following the same goal as that of the Israeli regime, which has been threatening the Islamic Republic with military strikes over its nuclear program.
“What the Americans want is the same Israeli plan," the source said. "Only instead of a military attack, [the Americans] politically want Iran to give up its nuclear independence of its own accord," the source added.
Washington and Tel Aviv have been coming up with the demand on the back of unsubstantiated claims of diversion towards “military purposes” about Iran’s nuclear activities.
The Islamic Republic’s nuclear program has, however, been proven to be utterly peaceful in nature on every occasion, when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would examine the program.
The country is also the agency’s most-verified member, and has invariably asserted its disinclination towards either developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear arms.
The stance has been endorsed in a fatwa (religious decree) issued by Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.
Tehran has also roundly spurned the idea of reducing its peaceful uranium enrichment level to zero -- a matter that was entirely dismissed during a recent address by the Leader.
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