France and Iran discuss risks to Mideast stability

PARIS (Reuters) -France's foreign minister said on Saturday that she had told her Iranian counterpart that the risk of a Middle East regional conflagration had never been greater and that Tehran and its proxies needed to end their destabilising activities.

"Iran and its associates must immediately stop their destabilising actions," Catherine Colonna said on social media platform X after speaking with Hossein Amirabdollahian.

"No one would gain from escalation."

Amirabdollahian said the only way to quell conflict was to resolve the root causes, Iran's state media reported.

"An effective step in ending violence in the region would be to stop the crimes of the Zionist regime (Israel) and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as taking action to stop the killing of civilians, facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid and prevent forced migration," the minister added.

(Reporting by John Irish, additional reporting by Dubai newsroom;Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)