Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Monday night to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon “with or without an agreement.”
“Iran will not have nuclear weapons. As long as I am prime minister of Israel, this will not happen,” the premier told reporters in his first press conference since U.S. President Donald Trump concluded his peace deal with the Islamic regime on Sunday.
Asked about reported disagreements with the Trump administration, Netanyahu said, “he is the U.S. president, I’m the Israeli prime minister—we often see eye to eye, and there are also instances where we see less eye to eye.”
Netanyahu said the “historic” joint U.S.-Israeli operation against Tehran “saved the State of Israel from the threat of nuclear annihilation.”
“All of us were exposed to that danger, and we pushed that threat back for years,” the Israeli leader said in his remarks. “Had we not acted, Iran would already have nuclear bombs.”
The weeks-long aerial campaign, which he described as the largest strike sortie in Israeli history, “crushed” Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, Netanyahu said, adding that “some estimate it at close to a trillion dollars.”
However, “the struggle is not over,” he added, noting ongoing threats in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip.
In Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces destroyed the overwhelming majority of missiles held by Hezbollah and took key positions from which the Iranian-backed terrorist army “threatened northern communities for years,” he went on to say.
“We broke the Iranian axis, the Iranian terror axis, and Hezbollah is a shadow of what it used to be,” Netanyahu declared.
The Jewish state is “stronger than ever” and will accomplish “many more great things,” including new alliances with “countries in the region,” according to the prime minister.
Trump said after concluding the memorandum of understanding with Iran on Sunday that any final agreement would allow Tehran to enrich uranium at low levels that “could never be used for military purposes.”
“They can never go beyond a certain amount,” he said in a phone call with The New York Times.
Trump further suggested that the new agreement grants the U.S. “strong policing powers” to ensure that Iran is not conducting nuclear work in violation of any of its commitments, the Times reported.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance told George Stephanopoulos on ABC‘s “Good Morning America” on Monday that the agreement negotiated by Trump was “performance-based” and contingent on the regime giving up its nuclear weapons program and stopping funding “terrorist activities all over the Middle East.”
Asked about Israeli concerns about the terms, the vice president declared it was “going to be a good deal for the people of Israel, for the people of the Gulf, the people of America and, again, potentially for the people of Iran as well.”
