Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday described what he said was a secret atomic warehouse in Tehran and accused Europe of appeasing Iran as he sought to rally support for U.S. sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Addressing the United Nations General Assembly, Netanyahu showed an aerial photograph of the Iranian capital marked with a red arrow and pointed to what he said was a previously secret warehouse holding nuclear-related material. He argued this showed Iran still sought to obtain nuclear weapons, despite its 2015 agreement with world powers to curb its program in exchange for a loosening of sanctions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe world will only laugh loudly at this type of false, meaningless and unnecessary speech and false shows,\u201d Qassemi said.<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that there should be more scrutiny on Israel\u2019s nuclear program.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn recent days we\u2019ve seen how much the policies that Netanyahu has imposed on America has isolated them in the General Assembly and Security Council,\u201d Zarif said, according to IRNA. \u201cNow see when they can pull America to this level of isolation how isolated they are themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Netanyahu did not identify the material nor specifically suggest that Iran had actively violated the nuclear deal.<\/p>\n
An outspoken opponent of the deal, Netanyahu has previously made allegations about Iran\u2019s nuclear activities that are difficult or impossible to verify, including presenting a cartoon bomb to the General Assembly in 2012 warning of how close Tehran was to producing a nuclear device.<\/p>\n
In April, Netanyahu presented what he said was evidence of a large secret archive of documents related to Iran\u2019s clandestine nuclear weapons program at a different site in Tehran.<\/p>\n
He said Israeli agents removed vast amounts of documents from that site. At the time, Iran said the documents were fake. In a speech in which he said relatively little about efforts to achieve peace with the Palestinians, Netanyahu said Iran had since begun moving items out of the second site.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince we raided the atomic archive, they\u2019ve been busy cleaning out the atomic warehouse. Just last month they removed 15 kilograms of radioactive material. You know what they did with it?\u201d he said. \u201cThey took it out and they spread it around Tehran in an effort to hide the evidence.\u201d He said Iranian officials still had a lot of work to do because there were some 15 shipping containers full of nuclear-related equipment and materials stored at the second site.<\/p>\n
France, Britain, Germany, China and Russia have stayed in the pact, vowing to save it despite the restoration of U.S. sanctions and this week discussing a barter mechanism they hope may allow Iran to circumvent the U.S. measures.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu criticized Europe for doing so in unusually harsh language that evoked European nations\u2019 initial failure to confront Nazi Germany in the 1930s. \u201cWhile the United States is confronting Iran with new sanctions, Europe and others are appeasing Iran by trying to help it bypass those new sanctions,\u201d Netanyahu said.<\/p>\n
A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States is aware of the facility Netanyahu announced and described it as a \u201cwarehouse\u201d used to store \u201crecords and archives\u201d from Iran\u2019s nuclear program.<\/p>\n
A second U.S. intelligence official called Netanyahu\u2019s comments \u201csomewhat misleading. First, we have known about this facility for some time, and it\u2019s full of file cabinets and paper, not aluminium tubes for centrifuges, and second, so far as anyone knows, there is nothing in it that would allow Iran to break out of the JCPOA any faster than it otherwise could.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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