TEHRAN - In a tweet on Friday, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif lambasted the U.S. administration for its insistence on triggering a highly controversial mechanism stipulated in UN Security Council Resolution 2231.

“After thrice being rejected by SC, U.S. now threatens ‘sanctioning anyone & any entity that comes between US’ & ‘its snapback.’ Obviously, they don't understand law or UN. Maybe they can grasp this: You divorced the JCPOA in 2018. Your name on the marriage certificate is irrelevant,” tweeted Zarif.

The foreign minister also posted a video of Alarabiya news network’s interview with Kelly Craft, the U.S. ambassador to the U.S.

“We will be sanctioning anyone and any entity that comes between the United States and our denying Iran access to weapons,” Craft said in response to a question from the network’s correspondent in New York, Talal al-Haj.

“You divorced the JCPOA in 2018. Your name on the marriage certificate is irrelevant,” Zarif tells the Trump administration.During a visit to New York on August 20, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo submitted what the U.S. officials call a “notification” to the UN Security Council in a bid to trigger the snapback process, a contested mechanism built into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that allows parties to the nuclear deal to restore all UN sanctions on Iran in the event that it didn’t uphold its obligations under the deal.

The U.S. complaint faced firm opposition from almost all members of the UN Security Council and all remaining parties to the nuclear deal. The opponents say the U.S. lost its legal authority to trigger the snapback process after it unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA on May 8, 2018.

However, the U.S. keeps insisting that it is still a “JCPOA participant state” as defined in UN Security Council Resolution 2231, and thus it has the right to restore the international sanctions on Iran, a move that could drive the final nail in the nuclear deal’s coffin.

SM/PA