Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel has thousands of pages of documents proving that Iran is working on a secret ...
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel has thousands of pages of documents proving that Iran is working on a secret nuclear weapons program in contravention to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. File Photo by Debbie Hill/UPI License Photo |
By Danielle Haynes, UPI
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday his country had thousands of pages of documents proving Iran is secretly pursuing a nuclear program.
The leader, long in opposition to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, said Iran lied when it agreed to curb its nuclear program in exchange for a lifting of sanctions in 2015.
"Iran did not come clean about its nuclear program," Netanyahu said in a televised speech as he stood before binders representing the documents he said proved his assertions.
He said the secret Iran program sought to "produce and test five warheads with 10 kilotons of TNT yield for integration on missiles." The program is codenamed "Project Amad."
"After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret files," Netanyahu said. "In 2017 Iran moved its nuclear weapons files to a highly secret location in Tehran."
"We can now prove that project Amad was a comprehensive program to design, build and test nuclear weapons," he said. "We can also prove that Iran is secretly storing project Amad material to use at a time of its choice to develop nuclear weapons."
The proof, he said, came in the form of 55,000 pages of documents and 55,000 files on CDs.
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on Twitter compared Netanyahu to the boy who cried wolf fable.
"You can only fool some of the people so many times," he said.
Netanyahu has offered praise for the Trump's administration's threat to pull out of the JCPOA if the deal isn't renegotiated. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered the United States' support to Israel in its efforts "to counter Iran's destabilizing and malign activity throughout the Middle East, and indeed throughout the world."
"We are determined to make sure [Iran] never possesses a nuclear weapon," Pompeo said Sunday at a joint news conference in Riyadh with Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir. "The Iran deal in its current form does not provide that assurance."
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