Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Friday lauded US President Donald Trump’s “courageous” decision to decertify the Iran nuclear agreement and impose sanctions on its Revolutionary Guards.
“Trump has just created an opportunity to fix this bad deal, to roll back Iran’s aggression and to confront its criminal support of terrorism,” said the premier, who has long argued that the 2015 accord must be “fixed or nixed.”
“That’s why Israel embraces this opportunity,” Netanyahu said just after Trump’s speech on Iran in Washington in which he laid out his country’s new policy toward Tehran that emphasised the need to fix flaws in the deal.
“If the Iran deal is left unchanged, one thing is absolutely certain: In a few years’ time, the world’s foremost terrorist regime will have an arsenal of nuclear weapons. And that’s a tremendous danger for our collective future,” he added. Netanyahu called on “every responsible government” and all those who care about global peace and security to back Trump’s confrontation of Iran’s terrorist regime.
In describing the new US policy on Friday, Trump declared that Iran was a “rogue” and “murderous” state sponsor of terrorism that was performing short of its obligations under the nuclear deal with world powers.
The president said he would order the Treasury Department to levy new sanctions against the “entire” Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps for its “terrorist activity,” and declared that he could not certify under US law that Tehran’s actions under the nuclear accord were “proportional” to US sanctions relief.
