The United States will begin “direct” negotiations with Iran regarding its nuclear program this weekend, President Donald Trump said on Monday.

“We’re having direct talks with Iran,” the president said. “They’ve started — they’ll go on Saturday, we’ll have a very big meeting. We’ll see what can happen. I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious. And the obvious is not something that I want to be involved with or frankly that Israel wants to be involved with if they can avoid it.”