Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian hedged his answers on the Iranian regime’s connection with the Houthis and Hezbollah in a Thursday night interview, denying any formal relationship with either Middle East terrorist group.
“As those who are resisting in the region based on the situations that have been imposed on them, we have contacts with them. There is no systematic relationship,” Pezeshkian said in an interview on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier.
Baier had asked Pezeshkian whether or not Iran would agree to stop arming the Houthis and Hezbollah as part of a peace deal and tell the Houthis to stop attacking Saudi Arabia.
“The Houthis are responsible for their own actions. They don’t take directions from us,” Pezeshkian told Baier.
As the United States and Iran have been at war, the Houthis have picked up attacks against neighboring Saudi Arabia in recent months, targeting the country after a yearslong peace. The flare-up of fighting between the Houthi rebels and Saudi Arabia has escalated tensions in the region during the period of war.
The U.S. government pings the Houthis and Hezbollah as Iranian proxies, due to the financial and military aid the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gives each group.
“Hezbollah, in reality, as those who resist, we feel that there is, in reality, a sort of common framework,” Pezeshkian said.
However, he distanced himself from any direct funding or military aid given to each group.
“Vis-a-vis the war and conflict, to the extent that I’m aware of, since the time I took over official responsibilities, there has been no such contact directing them to engage, from a humanitarian standpoint and human rights standpoint,” Pezeshkian said.
The attacks from both Hezbollah and the Houthis have added an extra layer to the U.S. war with Iran. Israel, which launched the initial joint attacks on the Iranian regime with the U.S. back in February, has reportedly long maintained that any peace deal needs to include protections against Hezbollah, which is primarily based in Lebanon, on Israel’s northern border.
As the Houthis ramp up attacks in Saudi Arabia, fighting between Hezbollah and Israel has also recently renewed, with the Israel Defense Forces citing two Hezbollah drone attacks as reasoning for mid-September airstrikes in southern Lebanon.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio reiterated the U.S. view that the Houthis “are an Iranian proxy” in a recent NBC News interview, countering Pezeshkian’s assessment. Rubio blamed the Houthis, in part, for high energy market prices, a major flash point of the Iran war, because of their recent attack on a Saudi oil pipeline.
“That is a problem, as well, that we’re confronting here. Again, it’s not Iran directly. It’s the Houthis, but the Houthis are an Iranian proxy,” Rubio said.