Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei has accused the US of trying to starve Iranians, referring to remarks by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio from earlier this week in which he said Iranians “eventually have to eat” and need to make a deal to end economic pressure by Washington.

He writes on X that Rubio is “openly and insolently threatening to starve Iranians through a blockade” and calls the comments “yet another admission that Washington is pursuing war crimes, compounding the atrocities it has already committed in its wars of aggression and economic terrorism against Iran”.

“After decades of failed coercion, threats, sanctions, terrorism, and aggression, the United States continues to repeat the same mistakes, merely repackaging them under new names,” Baqaei writes, saying that Washington’s approach is a “textbook example” of a ’“March of Folly: a government persisting in a disastrous course of action, refusing to learn from its failures, and becoming even more entrenched in its mistakes with every successive defeat”.