Iran: Israel must return Golan without terms

Tehran: Iran said on Saturday its arch foe Israel must return the occupied Golan Heights to Syria without setting any conditions, after the two governments announced they had resumed peace talks through Turkish mediators.

"We support Syria in retrieving the Golan and we do not see the Zionist regime in a position to set conditions on this issue," Foreign Minister Manou-chehr Mottaki told reporters a joint press conference Hamas leader Khalid Mesha'al during a visit to Iran on Saturday.

"The Zionist regime is in a situation that it inevitably has to pull out of occupied lands," he said. "Hopefully it will pull out of all Palestinian lands."

Israeli officials have in the past conditioned any peace deal on Syria's ending its three-decade-old alliance with Iran as well as its support for Lebanese and Palestinian fighter groups. But Syria has repeatedly baulked at any such linkage.

Mesha'al said he was not convinced the Israeli government could deliver on any undertaking to return the Golan Heights. "We have a big doubt about whether Israel is serious about returning the Golan," he said. "We regard [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert as too weak to be able to take such a step."

"There is great scepticism concerning the seriousness [of Israel] to return the Golan," he said, referring to strategic plateau captured by Israel in 1967. "It's a well known game and besides, Olmert's weakness will not allow him to take this step."

Talk of a full withdrawal from the strategic territory, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war and unilaterally annexed in 1981, have raised a storm of criticism inside Israel.