TEHRAN, IRAN: The Iranian Foreign Ministry responded to Saudi Arabia's call for global action against the regime, stating that the Kingdom should refrain from "baseless allegations and hate-mongering".

This response came a day after Saudi Arabia's ruling monarch King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud urged the international community to take a "decisive stance" to thwart Iran's efforts to develop its own nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.

The monarch stressed in an annual address to a top government advisory body that "the dangers of Iran’s regional project, its interference in other countries, its fostering of terrorism, its fanning the flames of sectarianism and calls for a decisive stance from the international community against Iran that guarantees a drastic handling of its efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction and develop its ballistic missiles programme".

In a virtual press conference in Tehran on Monday, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh stated that it was not "unnatural" for Saudi rulers to make such remarks, adding that "I believe Iran’s message has been clear - the Saudi regime must know that peace cannot be achieved through killing the people of Yemen, the region cannot be ruled through propagating Wahhabism and Takfiri groups, money cannot be spent to lobby, and resources of the Muslim world cannot be spent to betray Palestine".

Saudi Arabia and Iran, in addition to their sectarian differences, have been locked in several proxy wars in the region for decades, with the most recent one being in Yemen, in which a Saudi-led coalition has been battling a Tehran-aligned Houthi movement since the past five years.

Regional tensions have been steadily festering since President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Iran Nuclear Deal, as Saudi Arabia (along with other Gulf states) fervently supported the imposition of additional sanctions on the Iranian regime. President-elect Joe Biden has assured that he would reinstate the JCPOA, but will place additional pressure on Iran's regional activities to insure compliance, and not being risked labelled as "soft" towards Iran.