Newsletter
Newsletter Support JNS

Gantz: Israel not ‘necessarily’ behind every incident in Iran

The Israeli defense minister was responding to claims that the Jewish state was responsible for recent fires at Iranian nuclear and power plants.

Anti-aircraft guns at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility. Credit: Hamed Saber via Wikimedia Commons.
Anti-aircraft guns at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility. Credit: Hamed Saber via Wikimedia Commons.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said on Sunday that the country is not behind every incident that occurs in Iran. He made his comments in the wake of fires that broke out at the Natanz nuclear site on Thursday and at a power station at Ahvaz on Saturday.

“Not every incident that transpires in Iran necessarily has something to do with us,” said Gantz, Reuters reported, in response to claims by Iranian officials, reported by Reuters, that the fire at Natanz erupted as a result of cyber-sabotage, and that Israel could have been behind the attacks.

Gantz also told Israel Radio that due to the complexity of the systems running Iran’s nuclear and power plants, “they have very high safety constraints, and I’m not sure [the Iranians] always know how to maintain them.”

The blaze at Ahvaz was extinguished by firefighters, and electricity was back up after partial outages, said Mostafa Rajabi Mashhadi, a spokesman for Iran’s state-run power company TAVANIR, according to Tehran’s Tasnim News Agency.

“I’m scared of what’s going to happen now,” Miri Bar-Halpern, a Jewish psychology lecturer at Harvard Medical School, told JNS. “I can already predict the backlash.”
Netanyahu remains 8 seats short of a Knesset majority as Eisenkot-led bloc secures 48 seats and Arab parties 19.
“They will push legislation very hard to end the Iran war, and it’s not inconceivable that they could get a fair amount of Republican support for that,” William Galston of Brookings told JNS.
“We, in American Jewry, don’t always look through the lens that our Israeli brothers and sisters are looking at the candidates or the issues through,” William Daroff told JNS. “They’re not voting on the issues that we tend to be most focused on.”