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Press TV has conducted an interview with Kaveh Afrasiabi, author and political commentator, about the illegal US-engineered sanctions imposed on Iran.

- Mr. Afrasiabi, first of all who are the ones who do not want to see the illegal sanctions on Iran lifted?

- Well of course Israel is on top of the list and the hawkish pro-Israel politicians in the US Congress I would rank as second and there are a number of pro-Israeli politicians in other Western capitals who are pushing for a hawkish policy against easing the sanctions on the part of the US and other Western governments.

And hopefully this will not pan out because these sanctions are hurting the average ordinary Iranians as your program just noted, a lot of cancer patients and others are suffering as a result of these unjust sanctions and if these sanctions continue, the number of those suffering among the average Iranian population will certainly grow.

And so that intend will reflect very negatively on the sanctioning regimes and the illegitimacy of the whole regime that is under increasing question by the bulk of the international community.

- And you spoke of Israel, just how much is Israel a determining factor in how relations between Iran and the West will develop or change?

- Well as we all know Israel and its allies will tremendous lobbying power over the policymakers in Washington and we have reports of some fissures between the White House and Tel Aviv with respect to the Iran policy and hopefully President Obama and his administration will be able to resist the undue pressure that interferes in American domestic politics and is trying to torpedo the progress in the nuclear talks that we witnessed in Geneva recently.

And of course next week there’s supposed to be a follow-up by the technical experts on both sides in Geneva and hopefully this issue of easing financial sanctions in order to facilitate the export of medicine and medical equipments to Iran will be on the agenda and tackled satisfactorily by these talks.

- You spoke about how sanctions have affected ordinary Iranians including the medical sector. I mean how badly have sanctions hurt the medical sector as opposed to the nuclear program itself because the nuclear program itself was the main target and the reason for the sanctions?

- Well of course we should not forget the cyber attack on the Iranian nuclear industry that could have been much worse hadn’t not been because of peremptory Iranian response.

But you know the entire sanction regime is targeting the Iranian population and the worse thing about it is of course with respect to the health sector because we have to avoid and now focus on this issue instead of simply focusing on the difficulties of procuring medicine and medical equipment, we need to consider other ripple effects of the sanctions in terms of increasing poverty and the difficulties for acquiring necessary medical services and so on and so forth, affecting the entire Iranian health sector.

So I think that that sector has been a casualty of these unjust Western sanctions and the Iranian people have been very patient but I think that very soon their patience will run out if the West continues with illegal unjust sanctions.