France joined the United States on Wednesday in rejecting Iran’s response to an incentives package aimed at defusing a dispute over its nuclear program as insufficient as negotiators from six major world powers plotted their next move.

France’s Foreign Ministry said the Iranian reply does not provide any clarification to the central question of whether the country would agree to freeze its nuclear program.

France regrets that Iran “has again chosen not to provide a clear response,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Romain Nadal said in Paris.

Senior diplomats from six nations that made the offer _ Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States _ and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana were to hold a conference call Wednesday to discuss the way ahead, U.S. and EU officials said.

Iran on Tuesday had presented a one-page document to Solana. The State Department deemed the reply unacceptable, making the prospect of new sanctions against the country more likely.

In the document, Iran says it will provide a “clear response” to the offer _ but only after it receives a “clear response” to questions it has about the incentives, U.S. officials said.

Wednesday’s conference call was to be a debriefing, with negotiators clarifying their stances on the Iranian response, an EU diplomat told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

U.S. officials said Iran’s response was not a definitive reply to the offer from major world powers to suspend uranium enrichment and reprocessing in exchange for economic and other benefits.

Instead, they said it was a restatement of Tehran’s earlier insistence on the right to conduct peaceful nuclear activities and essentially a transcription of portions of recent telephone conversations between Solana and chief Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili.

The offer was reiterated to Iran on July 19, when senior diplomats from the six nations and the European Union met in person with Jalili to set an informal two-week deadline for Iran to either accept or reject it.

A top official with the International Atomic Energy Agency, Deputy Director General Olli Heinonen, will travel to Iran on Thursday for talks with officials there, IAEA spokesman Marc Vidricaire said in Vienna, Austria.

It is unclear if Iran’s response will be on Heinonen’s agenda.

The United States and others accuse Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian atomic energy program. Iran denies the charge, insisting its program is peaceful, but it has thus far refused to halt enriching uranium, a process that can produce the ingredients for a bomb.

Iran currently is under three sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions and could soon face a fourth unless it accepts the incentives package. In addition, the United States, the European Union and individual EU nations have imposed their own unilateral sanctions against Iranian banks and other institutions.

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Associated Press writers Jenny Barchfield in Paris and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed this report.