Iran's friends should have defied U.S. sanctions during pandemic: President Rouhani

[September 05, 2020]  (Reuters) - Iranian President Hassan Rouhani bemoaned Iran’s friends on Saturday for not standing up to the United States and breaking crippling sanctions during the coronavirus pandemic.

He also said that if the United States had a "bit of humanity or brain," it would have lifted sanctions on Iran for the duration of the health crisis.

Iran, with over 380,000 registered cases and over 22,000 deaths from the coronavirus, is one of the countries worst-hit by the pandemic in the Middle East.

"Over the past months since the coronavirus arrived in our country... no one came to our help," Rouhani said in remarks broadcast live on Iranian state television.

If the United States "had a bit of humanity and brain," he said, it would have offered to "lift the sanctions for a year because of the coronavirus."

But the United States “is far more heartless and evil than those things," he added.

Instead, it "imposed new sanctions and pressures on us over these past seven months of coronavirus," Rouhani said.

At the same time, he said, “not a single friendly country told us that in this time of coronavirus and hardship and for the sake of humanity ‘we will stand up to America'" and do business with Iran despite threats of U.S. retaliation.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani speaks at a news conference on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, U.S., September 26, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan Mcdermid/File Photo

The United States has threatened to impose sanctions on whoever conducts business with Iran.

The sanctions are part of the U.S. effort to slash Iranian revenues after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018 from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

(Editing by Toby Chopra)

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