The United Nations Security Council has held an emergency meeting to discuss deadly protests in Iran amid threats by United States President Donald Trump to intervene militarily in the country.
Members of the influential 15-member UN body heard from Iran’s deputy UN representative, who warned at the meeting on Thursday that Iranians did not seek a confrontation but would respond to US aggression, and accused Washington of “direct involvement in steering unrest in Iran”.
US representative Mike Waltz used his prepared remarks at the meeting to criticise the Iranian government’s response to the protests, noting that the ongoing internet blackout in Iran made it hard to verify the true extent of the crackdown by authorities there.
“The people of Iran are demanding their freedom like never before in the Islamic Republic’s brutal history,” Waltz said, adding that Iran’s claims that the protests were “a foreign plot to give a precursor to military action” were a sign that its government was “afraid of their own people”.
Waltz did not refer to the threats of military intervention in Iran that Trump has repeatedly made over the past week, before the president appeared to ease his escalating rhetoric over the past day.
Iran’s deputy UN envoy Gholamhossein Darzi told the council that his country “seeks neither escalation nor confrontation”.
“However, any act of aggression, direct or indirect, will be met with a decisive, proportionate, and lawful response under Article 51 of the UN Charter,” Darzi said.
“This is not a threat; it is a statement of legal reality. Responsibility for all consequences will rest solely with those who initiate such unlawful acts,” he said.
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