Israel will prevent the Iranian regime from obtaining nuclear weapons “at any cost,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told JNS on Monday.
“Leaving Iran as a nuclear threshold state—this will not happen. At any cost,” the right-wing Cabinet member said in response to a question by JNS at a meeting of his Religious Zionism Party at the Knesset in Jerusalem.
“We are committed to this. President [Donald] Trump is committed to this,” declared Smotrich, adding that the goal of preventing the regime from obtaining a nuclear bomb could be done through a deal or force.
Jerusalem would only back an agreement between the United States and Iran if it would lead to an international force destroying “all the centrifuges, all the devices” used by the Islamic Republic to enrich uranium, he said.
“Or we [Israel] will do it by force,” Smotrich warned.
Any deal should also address Tehran’s development of ballistic missiles and its malign proxy influence in the Middle East, he declared.
“Iran also threatens world peace through ballistic missiles and proxies,” the minister said to JNS, adding: “It sent proxies here, to surround the State of Israel, and sent them to destroy us on Oct. 7.”
Trump said in an interview aired by NBC‘s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that his administration would accept nothing but “total dismantlement” of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear capabilities.
The U.S.president said he might be “open” to about Tehran’s alleged pursuit of civilian nuclear energy, but added that he is skeptical with regard to the regime’s need for non-military nuclear energy.
“There’s a new theory going out there that Iran would be allowed to have civilian, meaning, to make electricity—but I say, you know, they have so much oil, what do they need it for?” Trump told NBC.
But “people are talking about that and this is something that’s really pretty new in the dialogue … and my inclination is to say: ‘What do you need that for? You have a lot of oil,’” he continued.
“I’d be open to hearing it … civilian energy, it’s called … but often civilian energy leads to military wars, and we don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon,” the American leader stressed.
Speaking at the JNS International Policy Summit last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Jerusalem would only agree to a deal with Iran that fully eliminates Tehran’s capacity to enrich uranium.
The only way to prevent the Islamic Republic from building a nuclear weapon is to dismantle “all the infrastructure of Iran’s nuclear program,” the prime minister declared at the conference, adding, “That is the deal.”
Israel, he continued, “cannot live with anything short of that—anything short of that could bring you the opposite result, because Iran will say, all right, I won’t enrich, wait, run out the clock, wait for another president, do it again.” This, he said, was “unacceptable.”
