Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Monday that Iran is seeking to develop and deploy guided weapons that can strike any point in the Middle East, including placing them in Yemen to strike Israel.
Netanyahu made the remarks as he met with visiting US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, where the two men gave a joint press conference before their talk.
“Iran is seeking to develop now precision-guided munitions, missiles that can hit any target in the Middle East with a circumference of five to ten meters,” Netanyahu said according to an English-language statement from his office. “They are developing this in Iran.”
“They want to place them in Iraq and in Syria, and to convert Lebanon’s arsenal of 130,000 [imprecise] rockets to precision-guided munitions,” he added. “They seek also to develop that, and have already begun to put that in Yemen, with the goal of reaching Israel from there too.”
“Iran is the single greatest threat to stability and peace in the Middle East,” Netanyahu warned and called on Washington to impose additional sanctions in order to stop what he called Iran’s “plunge for everything” in the Mideast.
Mnuchin at the meeting pledged to increase economic sanctions against Iran, saying Washington’s “maximum pressure campaign” is halting Iranian aggression.
Last week Israel’s Army Radio reported that Israel was readying for a direct cruise missile or drone strike by Tehran in response to recent attacks on Iranian regional proxies which have been attributed to the Jewish state.
The report cited anonymous Israeli sources who said the IDF was already on high alert for the possibility.
The high-level security cabinet will convene for a special meeting on Tuesday against a backdrop of tensions with the Islamic Republic, the report said.
Iran appears to have been building up its drone activities and attacks in recent months. In August, Israeli fighter jets carried out airstrikes in Syria to thwart a planned attack on Israel by Iran-backed fighters using armed drones, the Israel Defense Forces said. The Israeli military said its strike targeted operatives from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force as well as Shiite militias who had been planning on sending “kamikaze” attack drones into Israel armed with explosives.
No comments:
Post a Comment