A handout picture released by the official website of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei shows him during a meeting in Tehran on Tuesday. Khamenei ruled out negotiations with the US, as tensions mount between the two countries after Washington blamed Tehran for attacks on Saudi oil installations. Photo: AFP

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Friday that US-allied Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates seem to wish to "fight Iran to the last American."

Zarif was responding to a statement a day earlier by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a visit to Abu Dhabi that: "While the foreign minister of Iran is threatening all-out war and to fight to the last American, we're here to build up a coalition aimed at achieving peace."

Zarif tweeted on Friday: "@SecPompeo has it the other way around: It's not #Iran that wishes to fight to the last American; rather, it is his #B_Team hosts who seem to wish to fight Iran to the last American."

Pompeo has previously blamed Iran for the dramatic weekend assault on two facilities, condemning an "act of war" which knocked out half the kingdom's oil production.

The rhetoric has raised the risk of an unpredictable escalation in a tinderbox region where Saudi Arabia and Iran are locked in a decades-old struggle for dominance.

After meeting with allies in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, Pompeo said there was an "enormous consensus in the region" that Iran carried out the attacks, despite its denials and Yemeni rebels' claims that they were responsible.

But Pompeo said the US was intent on finding a way out of the confrontation.

"We'd like a peaceful resolution. I think we've demonstrated that," he told reporters.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif earlier warned any US or Saudi military strike on Iran could lead to "all-out war."

"We don't want war," he told CNN in an interview aired Thursday, "but we won't blink to defend our territory."

Saudi officials on Wednesday unveiled what they said were fragments of 25 drones and cruise missiles fired Saturday at the oil facilities in the country's east, engulfing them in flames.

The United Nations said that experts had arrived in Saudi Arabia to investigate Saturday's attack, "at the invitation of the Saudi authorities."

French President Emmanuel Macron has been pushing for the meeting to defuse the standoff over the Iranian nuclear program.