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News > Iran

Iran: Trump To Impose Weekly Sanctions Until Biden Takes Power

  • Iranians wearing face masks walk in a street in Tehran, Iran. U.S. President Donald Trump has announced that he will impose new weekly sanctions on Iran to prevent Joe Biden from re-entering the Iran Nuclear Deal. November 10, 2020.

    Iranians wearing face masks walk in a street in Tehran, Iran. U.S. President Donald Trump has announced that he will impose new weekly sanctions on Iran to prevent Joe Biden from re-entering the Iran Nuclear Deal. November 10, 2020. | Photo: EFE/EPA/Abedin Taherkenareh

Published 10 November 2020
Opinion

The increasingly aggressive measures aim to prevent the future Biden administration from re-entering the Iran nuclear deal, Axios reports.

According to Axios, citing Israeli sources, the Trump administration will impose sanctions on Iran every week until President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration in January.

Elliott Abrams, the State Department's special representative for Venezuela and Iran, has been in Israel meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and national security advisor Meir Ben-Shabbat to discuss the plans, according to the news agency.

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Although Abrams reportedly announced the new weekly sanctions in a closed briefing, Abrams met with Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi to shore up the plans on Monday. 

The U.S. special representative will also travel to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to discuss the measures, which, according to Axios, will be linked to Iran's ballistic missile prorgram, support for allied groups in the region, and concerns over human rights.

The report claims that the Trump administration believes that the weekly sanctions on Iran will make it far more difficult for President-elect Joe Biden to re-enter the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, one of his stated foreign policy goals. Ever since Trump withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018, his administration has imposed crushing sanctions on the Islamic Republic. 

Despite UN officials' and governments' calls to halt sanctions during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration has not relented in its "maximum pressure" campaign.

US sanctions on Iran have drastically increased pressure on the cost of living for ordinary people, driving up everyday goods prices, including basics like food and medicine.

On Sunday, Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told his Middle Eastern neighbors not to rely on Washington to help them after Trump's election loss.

"Trump's gone in 70 days, but we'll remain here forever," Zarif tweeted on Monday in what he called "a sincere message to our neighbors."

His tweets, one in English and the other in Arabic, urged the region to stop "betting on outsiders" to provide security and called on them to turn to dialogue to "resolve differences."

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