New Delhi:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday accused Iran of planning attacks against the Jewish state. He said everything possible would be done to prevent them. “Iran’s aggression in our region, and against us, continues,” Netanyahu said. He was speaking on the day US General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was in the country to meet his Israeli counterpart Aviv Kohavi. Netanyahu said “we are taking all necessary actions to prevent Iran from entrenching here in our region.” “This includes the activity necessary to thwart the transfer of lethal weaponry from Iran to Syria, whether by air or overland.
“We will also take action to thwart Iran’s effort to turn Iraq and Yemen into bases for launching rockets and missiles” at Israel, he added.
Earlier, Netanyahu accused Iran of having a previously undisclosed site aimed at developing nuclear weapons that it destroyed. Iran destroyed the site located near the city of Abadeh, south of Isfahan, sometime between late June and late July after realising that Israel had detected it, Netanyahu alleged.
In an address on live television, with photos of the alleged site on a screen behind him, Netanyahu referred to an intelligence trove he had previously announced last year.
“Today we reveal that yet another secret nuclear site was exposed in the archives that we brought from Tehran,” Netanyahu said.
“In this site, Iran conducted experiments to develop nuclear weapons... When Iran realised that we uncovered the site, here’s what they did: They destroyed the site, they just wiped it out.”
Earlier, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said that destroying arch-rival Israel was an “achievable goal”. “This sinister regime must be wiped off the map and this is no longer ... a dream (but) it is an achievable goal,” Major General Hossein Salami said. The comments came amid particularly heightened international tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme.
Four decades on from Iran’s Islamic revolution, “we have managed to obtain the capacity to destroy the imposter Zionist regime”, he said.
Iranian generals routinely express the desire to destroy Israel or claim to be able to wipe out Tel Aviv.
However, official discourse in recent years has generally taken care to clarify that the Jewish state will cease to exist because of its own “arrogance”, not because of an attack by Iran.
