Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Was Barack Obama Handshake With Iran Leader Just ‘Accidental’?

President Barack Obama and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif shook hands at the United Nations, an Iranian official said on Tuesday, the first handshake between a U.S. president and a high-ranking Iranian official in over 30 years.

Iran and the United States have been at loggerheads since they severed diplomatic ties shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution. But relations have improved since July when a deal ended a standoff between Iran and the West over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

The senior Iranian official said the handshake on Monday at the United Nations headquarters in New York “was not preplanned.”

“It was kind of accidental and happened after (President Hassan) Rouhani’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Monday,” said the senior official on condition of anonymity.

“Nothing was planned at all, and it just happened in a few seconds and they greeted each other as well.”

Iran’s Students News Agency ISNA, citing an unnamed source, said Obama and Zarif shook hands when they ran into each other at the Assembly.

There has already been some increased contact between the two sides in recent years. Obama and his counterpart Rouhani, spoke by telephone in 2013 and the nuclear talks involved direct talks between Iranian and U.S. foreign ministers.

The handshake could prompt hardliners in Iran to protest and to call on Zarif to provide an explanation. The minister, who is known as a pragmatist, had to appear before parliament for taking a 15-minute walk down Geneva sidewalks with Kerry during nuclear talks in January.

A landmark nuclear deal was reached between Tehran and six major global powers in July aimed at curbing the country’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting economic sanctions.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.