UNITED NATIONS >> Iran’s new president accused Israel on Monday of seeking a wider war in the Middle East and laying “traps” to lead his country into a broader conflict.

Masoud Pezeshkian told about two dozen media representatives that Iran doesn’t want to see the current war in Gaza and airstrikes across the Israeli-Lebanon border expanded.

“We don’t want to fight,” he said. “It’s Israel that wants to drag everyone into war and destabilize the region. … They are dragging us to a point where we do not wish to go.”

Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon and reformer, defeated a hardliner in Iran’s July presidential runoff, after the death of the former president in a helicopter crash. He is making his debut on the international stage at this week’s annual gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly, just as Israel steps up attacks on Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.

The Iranian leader, who will turn 70 on Sunday, said that while Israel insists it doesn’t want a wider war, its actions show otherwise. Pezeshkian pointed to the deadly explosions of pagers, walkie-talkies and other electronic devices in Lebanon last week, which he blamed on Israel, and the assassination of Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31, hours after Pezeshkian’s inauguration.

Pezeshkian said the Iranian drone and missile attacks on Israel in April, in response to attack on an Iranian consular building in Syria’s capital that Tehran blamed on Israel, proved its defensive capabilities.

He said Iran is not seeking to destabilize the Middle East.

“We are willing to put all our weapons aside so long as Israel is willing to do the same,” he said.

Two weeks ago, the United States and Britain formally accused Iran of supplying short-range ballistic missiles to Russia to use against Ukraine and announced new sanctions on Moscow and Tehran before a joint visit to Kyiv by their top diplomats.

Pezeshkian insisted that Iran has not and will not supply Russia with ballistic missiles to attack Ukraine.

“We have never approved of Russia’s aggression against Ukrainian territory,” he said, adding that the two countries should establish a dialogue.

The president was asked about Iran’s nuclear program following the Trump administration’s withdrawal from its 2015 nuclear deal with the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany. It has seen Tehran expand its uranium enrichment from 3.67% purity under the deal to 60% purity, making many countries in the West nervous that it is seeking to make a nuclear weapon.

Would Iran go back to low-enriched uranium and give up its stockpile of high enriched uranium if the nuclear deal is restored?

Pezeshkian said weapons of mass destruction have no place in Iran and its military structures.

“We are still ready to live up to the same framework” that was agreed on in 2015, he said, but the Europeans tried to get Iran to sign a different accord.