Israel sees “eye to eye” with the Trump administration on the Iranian threat, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Monday.
“I only say that we are committed to Iran not being a nuclear power,” Smotrich said in response to a question from JNS at a meeting of his Religious Zionism Party’s Knesset faction.
“The American president will decide how to do this,” he added, declining to expand further on the issue.
The Islamic Republic has upped its stockpile of near-weapons grade uranium, enough to build six nuclear bombs, according to an International Atomic Energy Agency report seen by Reuters last week.
Israeli opposition head Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid Party) told JNS on Monday, “It is Israel’s goal to make sure that we prevent—in any possible way—Iran from becoming a nuclear power and maintaining and getting a nuclear bomb. ... I mean both diplomatically and military efforts.
“We will work with the Americans on this,” he said. “We are following, of course, the letter President Trump has sent to the supreme leader of Iran, [Ali] Khamenei, and we’ll keep on following it. But Israel is reserving the right to act on its own as well, in order to make sure that Iran does not become a nuclear power... because this will throw the Middle East into a new nuclear race and nobody wins.”
U.S. President Donald Trump revealed on Friday that he sent a letter to Khamenei, urging him to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Washington or face possible military action.
“I said: ‘I hope you’re going to negotiate, because it’s going to be a lot better for Iran,’” Trump said in an interview with the Fox Business Network channel. He said he sent the letter on Thursday.
Ready to attack
Former Defense Minister Benny Gantz, the leader of Israel’s National Unity Party, which now sits in the opposition, emphasized on Monday that Jerusalem must be ready to attack “if and when needed.
“I think Iran should not be able to possess military nuclear capacity and capabilities,” he reiterated in response to a question from JNS at the weekly faction meeting of his party at the Knesset in Jerusalem.
“I think it’s a war challenge. I think it’s a challenge for the entire region.
It’s also a threat to the State of Israel,” Gantz said, noting that while he hopes that Tehran “won’t go in this direction,” Jerusalem “should be ready to act.”
On Feb. 26, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar told Politico that a “reliable military option” is required to deter the Islamic Republic from taking the final steps toward acquiring nuclear weapons.
Time was running out to act against Tehran’s nuclear program, as it had enriched enough uranium for a “couple of bombs” and was “playing with ways” to weaponize it, he said.
Jerusalem is open to pursuing a diplomatic path, he said, adding that the chances of talks being successful were “not huge” and that a failure to stop Tehran would be a “catastrophe for the security of Israel.”
Also adding to the urgency of addressing the threat emanating from Tehran, Sa’ar said at the time, was the recent uptick in Iranian arms being smuggled into Judea and Samaria, where Israeli security forces have been conducting a major counter-terrorism operation since Jan. 21.
Meanwhile, in a meeting on Monday with Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the United Nations special coordinator for Lebanon, Sa’ar warned that the Iranians were “smuggling money to Hezbollah to restore its power.
“Lebanon has an opportunity to break free from Iranian occupation!” he wrote in a social media post after the meeting.
Announcing the renewal of Washington’s “maximum pressure” policy on Iran on Feb. 4, the Trump administration said that “for far too long—all the way back to 1979, to be exact—nations have tolerated Iran’s destructive and destabilizing behavior in the Middle East and beyond.
“Those days are over. Iran has been the leading sponsor of terrorism, and their pursuit of nuclear weapons threatens the civilized world. We will never let that happen,” the White House added in the statement.
