Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Sunday said he hoped for a change of political regime for the people of Iran, in a message marking the Persian New Year, or Nowruz.
“Nowruz literally means ‘new day.’ And that’s my greatest wish to you, the Iranian people: that you will see a new day — a day of freedom from the cruel Iranian regime,” he said in a video message in English.
Israel considers Iran an “existential threat” and the two countries have been at loggerheads since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the Western-backed shah.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Bennett’s remarks also came as Israel has vehemently opposed the revival of a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia.
The deal granted the Islamic republic much-needed sanctions relief in return for curbs on its nuclear program, but unraveled after the US unilaterally pulled out in 2018.
On Friday, Bennett had appealed to the US not to remove Iran’s Revolutionary Guards from its blacklist of foreign terrorist organizations as part of a renewed deal.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “is a terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of people, including Americans,” he said in a joint statement with Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Yair Lapid.
The US on Wednesday said that Washington and Tehran were close to an agreement on restoring the 2015 accord.
“We are close to a possible deal, but we’re not there yet,” US Department of State spokesman Ned Price said. “We do think the remaining issues can be bridged.”
Sources close to the talks have said that outstanding issues include Tehran’s demands for Washington to delist the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group.
At a Cabinet meeting on Sunday, Bennett denounced what he said was a desire to sign the Iran deal “at almost any price, including saying that the largest terrorist organization in the world is not a terrorist organization.”
“That is too high a price to pay,” he added.
Meanwhile, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday expressed hopes for the improvement of his country’s economy during a speech to mark Nowruz.
“These economic problems are curable and we hope that some of them will disappear this year,” Khamenei said during his televised speech.
The problems “will not all disappear at once but gradually,” Khamenei said, adding that the toughest ones encountered last year were due to “rising prices and inflation.”
“One of the most important happy events of the last year was that the Americans themselves admitted that they suffered a shameful defeat in their maximum pressure policy against Iran,” Khamenei said.
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