A meeting between Iran’s foreign minister and senior European diplomats has yielded hopes of further talks but no indication of any immediate concrete breakthrough, a week after the crisis centered on the Iranian nuclear program erupted into war between Israel and Tehran.

European officials urged Iran to restrict its nuclear program hoping for off-ramp from conflict before President Trump decides whether to join Israel’s bombing campaign.

Iran has said it will not resume talks over its nuclear programme while under attack, hours after Israel's defence minister warned of a "prolonged" conflict with the Islamic Republic. Fighting raged on Friday as Iran fired a salvo of missiles at northern Israel and Israel targeted dozens of sites in Iran.

While President Donald Trump weighs whether to join Israel’s assault on Iran, foreign policy veterans and analysts argue that a negotiated settlement, not bombs nor commandos, is the only way to eliminate the threat of Tehran gaining a nuclear weapon.

Hidden away in a mountainside south of Tehran is an enrichment plant that is vital to Iran’s nuclear ambitions - and Israel’s attempts to dismantle them.

When President Trump said this week that Iran “cannot have a nuclear weapon” but was perhaps “a few weeks away from having one,” he was in effect introducing a familiar feature to the public debate over America’s involvement in the Israel-Iran war: an element of urgency unsupported by any publicly available facts.