The U.N. atomic agency said on Friday it held "very constructive" talks with Iran, in the latest potentially positive sign since the more moderate Hassan Rouhani became president.

Following a flurry of meetings at the U.N. General Assembly this week in New York, Herman Nackaerts, chief inspector of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in Vienna that the two sides would come together again on October 28.

Oil prices eased in Asian trade Friday after the United States and Russia agreed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution on destroying Syria's chemical arms, analysts said.

New York's main contract, West Texas Intermediate for delivery in November, dipped 32 cents to $102.71 in afternoon trade, while Brent North Sea crude for November was down 13 cents at $109.08.

Israel on Thursday denounced Iran's call to acknowledge its nuclear weapons, accusing new leader Hasan Rouhani of diverting attention from the regime's own nuclear work.

Rouhani, who is seeking a deal with the West on a nuclear standoff, called in a U.N. speech for the abolition of all nuclear weapons and urged Israel to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Iranian leader Hasan Rouhani Thursday called on Israel to admit it has a nuclear bomb ahead of a landmark meeting between Iranian and western foreign ministers.

Rouhani also said he believed a deal could be struck with the international community on his own country's controversial nuclear drive within three to six months.

Iran's former reformist president Mohammad Khatami has called for the release of all political prisoners, notably opposition chiefs Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

"We're happy with the (judiciary's) announced pardon of 80 prisoners but we ask: 'Why this number?'" the reformist daily Etemad quoted him as saying.

Israel derided Iran's new president as an expert salesman who is bullish on nuclear proliferation in a bitingly sarcastic tweet sent Wednesday.

It came from the Israeli Embassy in Washington and poses the question of what President Hasan Rowhani's LinkedIn page might look like.

The Sukkot holiday has come at a time of raised hopes for the small Jewish community in Iran of a new approach towards minorities under the Islamic republic's new President Hasan Rowhani.

In a radical about-turn from his Holocaust-denying predecessor, Rowhani, in an interview with CNN, condemned the Nazi genocide as a "reprehensible" crime.

The United States offered to set up "an encounter" between President Barack Obama and his new Iranian counterpart during a U.N. summit but it proved "too complicated" for the Iranians, a U.S. official said Tuesday.

Confirming that Obama would not meet with Iranian President Hassan Rowhani in New York, the official said the Iranians informed the U.S. Tuesday that they could not arrange it.

French President Francois Hollande on Tuesday urged Iran to make "concrete gestures" on its nuclear program before his meeting with Tehran's new leader.

"France expects Iran to make concrete gestures to show that it renounces its military nuclear program, even if it has a right to a civilian program," Hollande told the U.N. General Assembly.

Iran said Tuesday there were no plans for a meeting between President Hasan Rowhani and his American counterpart Barack Obama at the U.N. General Assembly.

"Such a meeting is not on the agenda," foreign ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham told reporters when asked about the White House not ruling out the possibility of a landmark encounter in New York.