US President Donald Trump is attempting to build trust with Iran to avoid an armed conflict, Washington's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, said in an interview released late on Friday.
On March 7, Mr Trump said he had sent a letter to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urging a resumption of negotiations about the Iranian nuclear programme. He also warned of potential military action.
“It roughly said: 'I'm a president of peace. That's what I want. There's no reason for us to do this militarily. We should talk,'” Mr Witkoff told right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson.
Mr Khamenei, in a televised speech on Friday, said: “The Americans should know threats will get them nowhere when confronting Iran.”
Mr Witkoff said Mr Trump has the military upper hand and it would be more natural for the Iranians to push for a diplomatic solution. “Instead, it's him doing that.”
He said the US is continuing discussions with Iran through “back channels, through multiple countries and multiple conduits”.
Mr Trump is “open to an opportunity to clean it all up with Iran, where they come back to the world and be a great nation once again … He wants to build trust with them,” he said.
Ties between Washington and Tehran have been strained further by the resumption of Israeli strikes on Gaza this week and US strikes on the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen after they threatened to resume attacks on international shipping through the Red Sea.
Mr Witkoff also spoke about the war in Gaza and attempts to revive the ceasefire that he helped to broker between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
He did not give details on what Mr Trump’s plan for Gaza is, but he said the priority was achieving “stability in Gaza” and that this “could mean some people come back. It could mean some people don’t come back.”
If Hamas wants “to stay there till the end of time and they want to rule Gaza” that would be “unacceptable” to the Trump administration, Mr Witkoff said.
Instead, Washington is aiming for the group disarm – if they agree then they could “stay there a little bit, be involved politically”, he said.
But the US “can’t have a terrorist organisation running Gaza, because that won’t be acceptable to Israel”.
