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With sanctions squeezing its economy, Iran is exploring the possibility of talks with the United States while resisting pressure to make major concessions.Since returning to the White House in January, US President Donald Trump has called for a new nuclear deal with Tehran while reinstating his “maximum pressure” policy of sanctions.Iran has officially ruled out direct talks as long as sanctions remain, with President Masoud Pezeshkian vowing on Tuesday that his country “will not bow in humiliation to anyone.”On Friday, Trump said he had sent a letter to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urging negotiations and warning of possible military action if Iran refuses.Iran’s top diplomat Abbas Araghchi said on Wednesday the letter was expected to be delivered “soon” by an Arab country.”Anwar Gargash, diplomatic adviser to the UAE president, is carrying the letter,” Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei told Iranian media on Wednesday.Observers say Tehran’s stance remains focused on its atomic programme.”It seems that Iran is ready for limited negotiations — in the sense that they will not extend beyond the nuclear issue,” said foreign policy analyst Rahman Ghahremanpour.Trump appeared to be seeking a “comprehensive agreement” covering Iran’s nuclear programme, missile capabilities — long criticised by Western governments — and its “axis of resistance”, a network of militant groups opposed to Israel.On Sunday, Iran’s mission to the United Nations said Tehran might consider talks only on “the potential militarisation” of its nuclear programme.”Should the aim be the dismantlement of Iran’s peaceful nuclear program… such negotiations will never take place,” it said in a statement.- ‘New expectations’ -After Trump revealed the letter, Khamenei slammed what he called “bullying” by some governments, saying negotiations with them serve only to exert dominance.”Negotiation is a path for them, a path to set new expectations,” he said in a speech on Saturday.”It is not just the nuclear issue that they are talking about now; they are setting new expectations that Iran will definitely not meet.”Khamenei, who has final say on state matters, has warned that talks with the United States will not solve Iran’s problems, citing past experience.During his first term, which ended in 2021, Trump reimposed heavy sanctions on Iran and pulled the United States out of the 2015 nuclear deal, calling it “the worst deal ever”.Tehran began rolling back its commitments to the agreement — formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — a year after Washington’s withdrawal. Efforts to revive the deal have since faltered.Millions of Iranians have struggled for years under crippling sanctions, which fuelled double-digit inflation and sent the rial plunging to 930,000 against the US dollar on the black market.Ghahremanpour said leaders in both countries are using “political rhetoric” to show “their own voter base” that they are negotiating from a position of strength.- ‘No choice’ -Ali Bigdeli, an international relations expert, said Iran appears to be “preparing, either through Russian mediation or other countries such as Saudi Arabia, to accept nuclear negotiations.”Iranian diplomats have recently held nuclear talks with Britain, France and Germany, along with separate discussions with Russia.On Wednesday, China announced it would host three-way nuclear talks with Russia and Iran later this week.Iran’s goal, according to Ghahremanpour, was to ensure that the United States “at least refrains from imposing new sanctions to prove its goodwill”.The UN atomic agency has warned that Iran has significantly increased its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to 60 percent purity — close to the 90 percent needed for an atomic bomb.Iran insists its nuclear programme is purely for peaceful purposes.Bigdeli dismissed the likelihood of military action against Iran, warning it “could set the Middle East on fire”.But he believes Iran has “no choice but to negotiate” with the United States.”Without talks with the West and sanctions relief, we cannot overcome these economic difficulties.”

Palestinians who say they suffered brutal beatings and sexual abuse in Israeli detention and at the hands of Israeli settlers testified about their ordeals at the United Nations this week.”I was humiliated and tortured,” said Said Abdel Fattah, a 28-year-old nurse detained in November 2023 near Gaza City’s Al Shifa hospital where he worked.Ahead of the hearings Daniel Meron, Israel’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva dismissed them as a waste of time, saying Israel investigated and prosecuted any allegations of wrongdoing by its forces.Fattah gave his testimony from Gaza via video-link to a public hearing, speaking through an interpreter.He described being stripped naked in the cold, suffering beatings, threats of rape and other abuse over the next two months as he was shuttled between overcrowded detention facilities.  “I was like a punching bag,” he said of one particularly harrowing interrogation he endured in January 2024.The interrogator, he said, “kept hitting me on my genitals… I was bleeding everywhere, I was bleeding from my penis, I was bleeding from my anus”.”I felt like my soul (left) my body.”- ‘Shocking’ -Fattah spoke Tuesday during the latest of a series of public hearings hosted by the UN’s independent Commission of Inquiry (COI) on the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.This week’s hearings, harshly criticised by Israel, are specifically focused on allegations of “sexual and reproductive violence” committed by Israeli security forces and settlers. “It’s important,” COI member Chris Sidoti, who hosted the meeting, told AFP. Victims of such abuse are “entitled to be heard”, he said.Experts and advocates who testified Tuesday spoke of a “systematic” trend of sexual violence against Palestinians in detention, but also at checkpoints and other settings since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks inside Israel sparked the war in Gaza.Meron, for Israel, slammed attempts to equate allegations against individual Israelis with Hamas’s “shocking… sexual violence towards Israeli hostages, towards victims on October 7”.Any such comparison was “reprehensible”, he told reporters on Monday.He insisted the hearings were “wasting time”, since Israel as “a country with law and order” would investigate and prosecute any wrongdoings.But Palestinian lawyer Sahar Francis decried a glaring lack of accountability, alleging that abuse had become “a widespread policy”.All those arrested from Gaza were strip-searched, she said, with the soldiers in some cases “pushing the sticks” into the prisoner’s anus.Sexual abuse happened “in a very massive way” especially in the first months of the war, she said.”I think you can say that most of those who were arrested in these months were subjected to such practice.” – ‘Just shoot me’ -The allegations of abuse are not limited to detention centres.Mohamed Matar, a West Bank resident, said he suffered hours of torture at the hands of security agents and settlers, even as Israeli police refused to intervene.Just days after the October 7 attack, he and other Palestinian activists went to help protect a Bedouin community facing settler attacks.As they were leaving the compound, they were chased and caught by a group of settlers, who he said were joined by members of Israel’s Shabak security agency.He and two other men were blindfolded, stripped to their underwear and, had their hands tied before being taken into a nearby stable.The leader stood “on my head and ordered me to eat … the faeces of the sheep”, said Matar.  With dozens of settlers around, the man urinated on the three, and beat them so badly during the nearly 12 hours of abuse that Matar said he cried: “just shoot me in the head”.The man, he said, jumped on his back and repeatedly “tried to introduce a stick into my anus”.Blinking back tears, Matar showed Sidoti a photograph taken by the settlers showing the three blindfolded men lying in the dirt in their underwear. Other pictures taken after the ordeal showed him with massive bruises all over his body.Speaking to journalists after his testimony, he said he had spent months “in a state of psychological shock”.”I didn’t think there were people on Earth with such a level of ugliness, sadism and cruelty.”