The Pentagon has denied a report concerning the expansion of US military presence in the Middle East.

The denial came in reaction to an article published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

The paper claimed that Washington was weighing the deployment of fourteen-thousand additional troops and a dozen of naval vessels in the region, to counter alleged threats from Iran.

A Pentagon spokesman, however, said that they were not considering sending additional troops to the Middle East.

"To be clear, the reporting is wrong. The U.S. is not considering sending 14,000 additional troops to the Middle East," Alyssa Farah tweeted.

This reporting by the @WSJ is wrong. The U.S. is not sending 14,000 troops to the Middle East to confront Iran. https://t.co/zxswP6sf3B — Alyssa Farah (@PentagonPresSec) December 5, 2019

Tensions between Tehran and Washington have been simmering since the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal last year and its re-imposition of sanctions against Iran. The US has since increased its military presence in the Persian Gulf.