Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said he was “disclosing for the first time that Iran has another secret facility in Tehran, a secret atomic warehouse for storing massive amounts of equipment and materiel from Iran’s secret nuclear weapons programme.”
Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly that Iran cannot be trusted and poses a massive threat to international security.
Netanyahu’s presentation, in which he used props, marked the latest in a run of accusations about Iran’s nuclear program as he ratchets up his campaign against the 2015 global accord that is meant to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Photo: Bloomberg
He said UN nuclear inspectors should examine the “secret atomic warehouse.”
Showing a map and photograph of the site, he said Iran concealed “massive amounts of equipment and material” in a facility near a rug-cleaning plant in Turquzabad District.
He said Iranian officials cleared out some radioactive material in recent weeks and secretly released it around Tehran.
“You have to ask yourself a question: Why did Iran keep a secret atomic archive and a secret atomic warehouse?” he asked. “What Iran hides, Israel will find.”
He said Israel shared the information with the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and urged it to inspect the site. Netanyahu made a similar accusation in May, saying Israeli agents spirited away a “half ton” of documents regarding Iran’s nuclear program from a facility in Tehran’s Shourabad neighborhood.
Iran has not acknowledged the alleged seizure.
US President Donald Trump cited that announcement when he withdrew the US from the nuclear accord soon afterward.
That agreement came after years of Western sanctions over Iran’s contested atomic program. The deal saw Iran drastically limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
Iran long has denied seeking atomic weapons.
In the 1990s, Iran expanded its nuclear program and “may have received design information” for a bomb and researched explosive detonators, the IAEA said.
By 2002, Western intelligence services and an Iranian opposition group revealed a covert nuclear site at the central city of Natanz.
The IAEA has said there was “no credible” evidence of Iran seeking a nuclear explosive device after 2009.
Israel, which considers Iran to be its biggest threat, has sought repeatedly to undercut the 2015 nuclear deal, despite the UN repeatedly confirming Iran abides by its terms.
Since Trump’s decision to withdraw from the accord, Iran’s already-anemic economic has seen a drastic devaluation of its rial currency. While the rial in May traded at about 62,000 to the US dollar, on Thursday it traded at about 177,000 to US$1.
Netanyahu urged European signatories to join Trump in abandoning the deal and halting trade with Iran.
“Does anyone seriously believe that flooding Iran’s theocracy with weapons and cash will curb its appetite for aggression?” Netanyahu asked.
“Europeans and others are appeasing Iran by trying to help it bypass” new US sanctions, he said. “Have these European leaders learned nothing from history? Will they ever wake up?”
It was a reference to then-British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s agreement handing Hitler the Sudetenland ahead of World War II, a move seen as Europe appeasing the Nazis at Jews’ expense.
Netanyahu on Thursday also showed images of what he said are rocket factories run by Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah hidden in civilian areas in Lebanon’s capital.
In Tehran yesterday, Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif dismissed the Israeli claims.
“No arts & craft show will ever obfuscate that Israel is only regime in our region with a *secret* and *undeclared* nuclear weapons program,” Zarif said in a tweet, calling on Israel to “open its illegal nuclear weapons” program to international inspectors.
Additional reporting by AFP
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema