Nuclear deal ‘based on lies’

‘‘That is just not an acceptable situation,’’ he said. ‘‘They [Iran] are not sitting back idly, they’re setting off missiles.’’ Trump refused to say what his final decision would be but said he was open to negotiating ‘‘a better deal’’. Iran and other members of the P5+1 bloc of world powers have said it is not possible to renegotiate the agreement or strike a new pact.

Netanyahu’s talk served as a counterweight to diplomatic efforts by Emmanuel Macron, president of France, and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, who both visited the White House last week to implore Trump not to scrap the agreement.

Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, mocked Netanyahu’s speech before it even began. ‘‘The boy who can’t stop crying wolf is at it again,’’ he said.

Netanyahu said 55,000 pages and 55,000 electronic documents had been secreted out of an archive in the Shorabad district of southern Tehran. He said Israeli spies had pulled off one of their ‘‘biggest-ever intelligence achievements’’ by getting the files out of Tehran but he gave no details about how they ended up in Israeli hands.

The files were from Project Amad, which Netanyahu said was a secret Iranian programme to develop nuclear weapons. Iran’s leaders have said consistently that they did not want a nuclear bomb and that their nuclear intentions were peaceful.

Project Amad was shelved in 2003 but elements secretly continued and remain functional to this day under the direction of the same Iranian scientists who conducted the original research, Netanyahu said.

– Telegraph Group