TEHRAN — America and Israel wouldn’t dare to attack Iran over its atomic program, President Ahmadinejad said, who pledged to continue his country’s nuclear work in defiance of the United Nations.

“If hundreds of countries such as Israel and the U.S. join forces, they will not dare attack Iran and they know it well,” Mr. Ahmadinejad told Malaysia’s official Bernama news agency in Kuala Lumpur, where he is attending a summit of the Eight Islamic Developing Countries. He said the demands for a halt to Iran’s nuclear development were “a repetitive scenario.”

Tensions over the Iranian dispute increased, helping push the price of oil to a record, after the New York Times said Israeli military maneuvers in the eastern Mediterranean last month were practice for a possible strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. President Bush said July 2 he is committed to pursuing a diplomatic solution to end the stalemate, yet “all options” remain in place.

The Bush administration “knows that it can not use the language of force of threats with the Iranian nation and it should take into account Iranians’ demands,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. The Iranian president’s remarks were carried yesterday by Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency before being televised by Bernama.

On July 5, Iran’s government replied to economic and technologic incentives offered by world powers in exchange for the suspension of uranium enrichment, indicating a willingness to negotiate on the package.

The foreign policy chief of the European Union, Javier Solana, who presented the incentives to Iran, said yesterday he wasn’t “too optimistic” about prospects for a deal as negotiations take place in the coming weeks, Agence France-Presse reported. “It’s difficult,” AFP cited him as saying in Paris.

America and allies accuse Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons. Iran, which is under three sets of U.N. sanctions for refusing to halt uranium enrichment, denies the allegation and says the nuclear program is aimed at generating electricity. Enriched uranium can fuel a nuclear reactor or arm a weapon.

Iran has restarted work on building equipment that nuclear experts say is mainly used for making atomic bombs, Britain’s Telegraph newspaper reported yesterday, citing intelligence reports received by unidentified Western diplomats.

The project is based on a blueprint sold to Iran by the scientist behind Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Telegraph said. Details on how to build the bomb were handed over in the early 1990s, the newspaper said.