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
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion