Israel says it has proof Iran lied over nukes

JERUSALEM >> Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that Israel is in possession of tens of thousands of documents and discs that prove Iran lied about the history of its nuclear weapons program when it signed the 2015 nuclear deal.

In a televised speech from Tel Aviv, Netanyahu dramatically pulled a curtain away from a shelf of files that he said were copies of some of the 55,000 documents that Israel had obtained from Iran’s secret nuclear archive. Most of the documents, as described, dated from 2003 and before, when Iran had a clandestine weapons development program dubbed “Project Amad.”

The speech came at a critical time for the nuclear deal, just ahead of a May 12 deadline for President Donald Trump to decide whether to continue to waive statutory sanctions that were lifted as part of the agreement.

In his remarks, Netanyahu said the cache confirmed something that has not been in dispute among signatories of the deal — that Iran has lied about its past nuclear efforts. He has waged a fierce campaign for the pact to be changed or scrapped.

Trump, speaking at a Washington news conference with the president of Nigeria, said Netanyahu’s revelations “showed that I’ve been 100 percent right” in describing the nuclear agreement as the “worst deal” ever signed. “We’ll see what happens,” he said of the coming deadline.

Richard Nephew, a former senior State Department official who was part of the U.S. team that negotiated the deal implemented in January 2016, said Netanyahu’s revelations were “interesting, and important for building a history of [Iran’s] program. But it is not a new revelation, at least in terms of where the program was when we were negotiating.”