US President Donald Trump has said the United States will not remove sanctions on Iran in exchange for Tehran's readiness to negotiate, in what was a repeat of his earlier Tweet, but this time in Farsi.
On Friday, the United States introduced new sanctions against Tehran that targeted six international petrochemical and petroleum companies and two persons accused of helping Iran skirt sanctions, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said in a statement.
Iran's Fars News agency also reported that its website was blocked by OFAC and the agency's inclusion in its Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list.
The United States has repeatedly vowed to continue economic pressure on Iran, insisting that the country should "change its behaviour", as US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has reiterated in a series of tweets recently.
On 5 January, Iran announced it will no longer comply with the limits of the 2015 nuclear deal, dubbed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), but Iran's President Hassan Rouhani said that Tehran would still not seek nuclear weapons.
The United States withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal on 8 May 2018, reintroducing harsh economic restrictions against Tehran. A year later, Iran announced that it had started to suspend some of its obligations under the nuclear deal.