Netanyahu vows to keep up fight against Iran nuclear arms
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that Israel would keep fighting to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons, as he spoke at a remembrance ceremony attended by Iran’s exiled crown prince.
Recalling a recent visit to Berlin, Mr Netanyahu said on Monday that since Nazi-era Germany “the world has changed, but the calls for our extermination have not ceased, and today come from the regime of horror in Tehran”.
“We are fighting resolutely against any nuclear deal with
Iran that will pave its way to nuclear arms,” he said in a speech on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“And for the same reason, we are fighting resolutely against
Iran’s terror proxies around us.” He warned of Israel’s “crushing response” to any enemy approaches in the speech at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem memorial.
Attending the ceremony was former Iranian crown prince Reza Pahlavi, whose father was the shah overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Mr Pahlavi, who landed on Monday for his first visit to Israel as the guest of Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel, said before the ceremony that the current regime did not represent the Iranian people. “Today, when we have a regime that denies that the Holocaust ever occurred,” he said.
“It was my duty to be here representing my fellow compatriots, to honour the victims of the Holocaust and pay my respects.”
On- off talks between Tehran and world powers to revive a 2015 landmark deal that sought to curb Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief have stalled since last year.
The deal Iran reached with Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the US collapsed after Washington’s unilateral withdrawal in 2018 under president Donald Trump.
In February, the UN nuclear watchdog said it had detected particles of uranium enriched to 83.7 per cent in Iran, just under the 90 per cent needed to produce an atomic bomb.
Iran denies wanting to acquire atomic weapons and says it had made no attempt to enrich uranium beyond 60 per cent purity.
He warned of Israel’s ‘crushing response’ to any enemy approaches, in a speech at the Yad Vashem memorial