Rouhani: Nuke deal cheapest way to achieve Iran’s goals

President Hassan Rouhani said the last year’s nuclear deal “was the cheapest way to achieve Iran’s goals and interests.”

Speaking in Tehran on Saturday at an iftar meal breaking the Ramadan fast, Rouhani said the pre-Iran nuclear-deal era is past and Iran now needs to take advantage of the new atmosphere to pursue its “national interests more than before,” Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

The country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday called for student associations to establish a “unified anti-US and anti-Zionist front” among the Muslim world’s students, Tasnim News Agency reported.

“By using advanced means of communication and in cyberspace, general campaigns can be formed by Muslim students based on the opposition to the policies of the US and the Zionist regime of Israel so that when needed, millions of young Muslim students create a big movement in the Islamic world,” he said.

Khamenei also warned against plots by enemies seeking to sabotage the country.

Separately, on Saturday, Fars News Agency reported a senior official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards as having said Israel’s Iran Dome anti-rocket system has vulnerabilities that were revealed in recent wars.

On a similar note, the deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Brig.-Gen. Hossein Salami, said on Friday “more than 100,000 missiles are ready to fly from Lebanon,” according to Tasnim.

“Today, the grounds for the annihilation and collapse of the Zionist regime are [present] more than ever,” he declared, saying there are “tens of thousands of destructive long-range missiles” from Islamic territories aiming at all of “occupied” Israel.

“If the Zionists make a wrong move, all the occupied territories will come under attack from dedicated fighters and, God willing, the territories will be liberated,” Salami warned.

On Friday, Rouhani accused Western powers of trying to exploit differences between the world’s Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims to divert attention from the Israel-Palestinian conflict, state television reported.

“We stand with the dispossessed Palestinian nation,” he said.