Moscow, Jun 26 (UNI/Sputnik) :Israel is committed to its strategic partnership with the United States despite the two countries’ disagreements over the Iranian nuclear deal, Ambassador to Russia Alexander Ben Zvi told Sputnik.

“Let us see how the negotiations [on the Iran nuclear deal] will unfold and what this will lead to. In any case, one needs to remember that … Israel and the United States are strategic partners. There is no other way to express this, and it is not important who heads the country, be that Trump, Biden, Clinton, and so on. Israel and the US are and will always be strategic partners,” Ben Zvi said.

The Biden administration’s efforts to reanimate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action have been met with criticism from Iran’s regional adversaries, as both Israel and the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council called for the expansion of the deal to include limitations on the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile program and measures to curb its financing of militia groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

“The matter of ballistic missiles was not included in the deal … and for this reason we were against [it] and insisted on the fact that this was just a bad deal from our perspective,” Ben Zvi said, adding that the deal also lacked clauses on Tehran’s support of armed proxy groups across the Middle East.

Dubbed by observers as the “Middle East Cold War”, the proxy war between Iran’s “axis of resistance” and the Saudi-led GCC has divided the region into two opposing camps, with a recent rapprochement between Israel and close Saudi allies Bahrain and the UAE as part of the Abraham accords, marking a new milestone in the ongoing regional standoff.(UNI)