Iranian President Hassan Rouhani delivers a speech during the ceremony of the National Army Day parade in Tehran, April 18, 2019. Photo: Tasnim News Agency / via Reuters.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has defended the July 2015 nuclear deal reached in Geneva between the Tehran regime, the United States and five other powers by portraying it as too “heavy for Zionists and the regional reactionaries to bear.”

Rouhani, a staunch backer of the JCPOA — the technical name for the nuclear deal — spoke up in favor of the deal at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, arguing that it had greatly enhanced Iran’s regional standing and benefited its economy through the lifting of international sanctions. President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018, with the US reimposing unprecedentedly strong sanctions on the Iranian regime that are biting the country hard.

Rouhani went on to praise his own cabinet for achieving what, in his view, past cabinets from the 1979 Islamist revolution onward had failed to do.

“We broke the political stalemate on the international stage and this government removed the obstacles in its first 100 days as we promised, leading to the Geneva Agreement [of 2015],” Rouhani said.

Were it not for regional rivalries, the deal would still be in place, Rouhani argued. “Saudi Arabia and the usurper Zionist regime” —  a reference to the State of Israel —  “spared a lot of effort to prevent the final agreement from happening,” he added.

“Saudi Arabia and the prime minister of the Zionist regime announced that they played a part in the United States’ withdrawal from the JCPOA, not to mention the extremists inside the US,” Rouhani concluded. “Of course, their actions proved that the JCPOA was heavy for Zionists and the regional reactionaries to bear.”