Former US secretary of state John Kerry on Monday denied Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s claim that the top US diplomat told him Israel had carried out 200 strikes on Iranian targets in Syria.
“I can tell you that this story and these allegations are unequivocally false. This never happened — either when I was Secretary of State or since,” Kerry tweeted.
The tweet cited a 2018 article by the Reuters news agency in which then-intelligence minister Israel Katz said that Israel had carried out over 200 airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria over the previous two years.
Kerry’s denial came amid pressure from some parts of the Republican party after The New York Times published a report on a leaked interview Zarif gave last year.
Zarif said that he was often kept in the dark about security matters, and that “to his astonishment,” Kerry told him that Israel had attacked Iranian interests in Syria at least 200 times.
In the recording, Zarif told the interviewer that he hadn’t been told about key issues.
“Kerry has to tell me that Israel has attacked you 200 times in Syria?” said Zarif.
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