TEHRAN, May 24: Iran said on Saturday Israel must return the occupied Golan Heights to Syria without setting any conditions, after the two governments announced they had resumed peace talks through Turkish mediators.

“We support Syria in retrieving the Golan and we do not see the Zionist regime in a position to set conditions on this issue,” Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters.

“The Zionist regime is in a situation that it inevitably has to pull out of occupied lands,” he said. “Hopefully it will pull out of all Palestinian lands.” Israeli officials have in the past conditioned any peace deal on Syria’s ending its three-decade-old alliance with Iran as well as its support for Lebanese and Palestinian militant groups.

But Syria has repeatedly baulked at any such linkage.

Mottaki was speaking at a joint news conference with the visiting leader of the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement Khaled Meshaal, who said he was not convinced the Israeli government could deliver on any undertaking to return the Golan Heights.

“We have a big doubt about whether Israel is serious about returning the Golan,” he said. “We regard (Israeli Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert as too weak to be able to take such a step.” Israel and Syria announced on Wednesday that they had resumed peace negotiations indirectly through Turkish mediators after an eight-year break.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said Israel had given a prior commitment to withdraw from the whole of the Golan Heights right down to the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Israel’s main water source.

But talk of a full withdrawal from the strategic territory, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war and unilaterally annexed in 1981, raised a storm of criticism inside Israel.

Analysts expressed doubt whether the Israeli prime minister had the votes in parliament to deliver on any pullout pledge.

Iran does not recognise Israel and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has drawn international condemnation by calling for the disappearance of the Jewish state. —AFP