Tel Aviv: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stepped up pressure on the US to pull out of a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, holding a prime-time address on Israeli TV to present what he called evidence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Intelligence experts and diplomats said he did not seem to have presented a “smoking gun” showing that Iran had violated the agreement, although he may have helped make a case on behalf of hawks in the US administration who want to scrap it.
Most of the purported evidence Netanyahu unveiled dated to the period before the 2015 accord was signed, although he said Iran had also kept important files on nuclear technology since then, and continued adding to its “nuclear weapons knowledge”.
Tehran dismissed Netanyahu as “the boy who cried wolf” and called his presentation propaganda.
President Donald Trump has threatened to pull the US out of the international deal unless it is renegotiated by May 12. After Netanyahu spoke, Trump repeated his criticism of the deal, suggesting he backed the Israeli leader’s remarks.
Read the report in The Sydney Morning Herald (Reuters).