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12 November 2013 - 13:47

US Secretary of State John Kerry says negotiations between Iran and the group of six major world powers in Geneva came ‘extremely close’ to yielding results.

“We were very, very close actually, extremely close,” Kerry told the BBC in an interview on Monday.

The US secretary of state added that none of the differences between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States - plus Germany were big enough to prevent a deal.

The intensive talks over Iran’s nuclear energy program kicked off in Geneva on November 7 and stretched into an unscheduled third day. The two sides, agreed to continue negotiations on November 20 in the same place.

Kerry once again claimed that the Iranian delegation had failed to respond to the proposal put forward by the six powers, causing talks to fall short of an agreement.

“We had a unity on Saturday in a proposal put in front of the Iranians... but they felt they had to go back.” Kerry said.

Addressing Kerry on Monday via his twitter, Iran's foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who headed the Iranian delegation in Geneva talks said, “Mr. Secretary, was it Iran that gutted over half of US draft Thursday night? And publicly commented against it Friday morning?"

This is while French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on Saturday November 9, at the beginning of the third day of talks, that Paris did not accept the initial draft of proposal because it failed to address certain issues.

“There is an initial draft that we do not accept... I have no certainty that we can finish up [at this stage],” Fabius told France Inter radio.

He also added that it was necessary to "take fully into account Israel’s security concerns."

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had preciously spoken of divisions among the six powers following his meeting with Kerry and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.

As Iran and the six major world powers express optimism about the prospect of achieving a nuclear deal in near future, Israel is spearheading a campaign to prevent such an agreement.

On November 10, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced a possible agreement in the course of the nuclear talks as “very, very bad.”

Describing a deal with Iran as a “historic mistake,” Israeli Minister of Military Affairs Moshe Ya’alon on November 9 urged the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany to be with Iran.

 

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