Top diplomats have contacted Prime Minister Tammam Salam to stop him from announcing his resignation over the country's waste management crisis which spiraled out of control over the weekend.

Ministerial sources told An Nahar daily published Monday that Salam has received phone calls from the ambassadors of major powers, Arab countries and the European Union in an attempt to convince him not to resign.

Iran's military shot down a suspected reconnaissance drone in a province on its western border with Iraq, a military official said Saturday.

"A while ago, an unknown drone entered the area and was identified by our monitoring systems," Farzad Fereydouni, air defense commander for Kermanshah province, told the official IRNA news agency.

The fevered partisanship of U.S. politics is damaging the country's foreign policy, Iran said Saturday, hitting out at threats of military action against it should nuclear diplomacy ultimately fail.

The comments in Tehran came after U.S. President Barack Obama said in a letter that all options remain on the table against Iran.

The United States will respond firmly if Iran fails to honor the accord aimed at curbing its nuclear program, President Barack Obama said Friday, as he works to win over undecided U.S. lawmakers.

"We have a wide array of unilateral and multilateral responses that we can employ if Iran fails to meets its commitments," Obama said in a letter dated August 19 and sent to Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat in the House of Representatives who announced that he will vote to approve the accord.

After two weeks of vacation spent largely on the golf course in Martha's Vineyard, President Barack Obama heads home to Washington to a full diplomatic plate: Iran, China and a highly anticipated papal visit.

The 44th US president managed to remain relatively low-key during his time off, hitting the beach with his family and publishing his Spotify playlists on Twitter. The White House also made public his summer reading selection.

Iran is seeking to transfer state-of the-art weaponry from storehouses in Syria to Hizbullah, the Israeli Foreign Ministry director-general Dore Gold told The Jerusalem Post from Berlin.

The weapons include the SA-22 (Pantsir- S1) air defense system and the Y‑akhont anti-ship cruise missile, said Gold, who is on his first trip to a European capital for high-level talks.

Britain and Iran will reopen their respective embassies in the coming days, an Iranian official said Thursday, four years after their closure when protesters angry over nuclear sanctions stormed the UK mission in Tehran.

The official said Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, who helped negotiate a historic deal between Iran and the West on the Islamic republic's nuclear program, "will travel Sunday to Iran for the reopening of the British embassy".

Iran on Thursday welcomed a U.N. peace plan aimed at ending the four-year war in its ally Syria, saying President Bashar Assad's regime needed to be directly involved.

"This new plan is seen as a step by regional and international players toward a better understanding of the reality on the ground and on the political level," foreign ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham was quoted as saying by news agency ISNA.

Iran has expressed its concerns to Turkey's ambassador over a recent spate of attacks on its citizens in the neighboring country, news media reported Thursday.

Nine Iranian trucks and a bus have been attacked or torched in Turkey since late July, Tabnak news agency quoted a transport official as saying Tuesday.

Robert Menendez on Tuesday became the second U.S. Senate Democrat to oppose President Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, but momentum within the party nevertheless appeared to be favoring the accord.

Despite Menendez joining a congressional chorus of disapproval of the landmark but controversial pact, Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell conceded that Obama likely had the votes to ensure the deal's survival.