Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday night said Iran was being emboldened by the emerging nuclear deal with world powers to expand its support for terror activity throughout the region, and warned Tehran was “grasping the Middle East with arms of terror and blood.”

The prime minister’s comments came hours after Russia announced that it would supply the Islamic Republic with S-300 missile air defense systems, prompting objections from Israel and the US.

“Iran draws encouragement from the concessions that it is receiving from the major powers,” Netanyahu said. “The message that Iran is receiving from this is that it is not being called upon to halt its aggression, that it can continue and even increase this aggression, and this is exactly what it is doing. It has been doing so in recent months, in recent weeks and in recent days…It is grasping the Middle East with arms of terror and blood.”

The prime minister cautioned that if the deal — which aims to curb Iran’s contested nuclear program in exchanged for sanctions relief — is finalized by the June 30 deadline, Tehran’s expansionist activities will receive “international legitimacy.”

“Iran is receiving legitimacy to continue these actions and when the sanctions are lifted shortly, if indeed the deal is approved, it will receive billions of dollars to finance its war and terrorism machines, with international legitimacy,” he said.

Israel has argued that any deal with Iran be contingent on its halting its support for terror groups Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The US has consistently rejected the approach, saying the two issues must be dealt with separately.

“Before our very eyes an absurd reality is taking shape in which the key to our fate and the future of the Middle East is liable to be delivered into the hands of the fanatical Iranian regime. An agreement full of holes with Iran will not ensure regional stability; a vigorous and resolute policy that prevents it from arming itself with nuclear weapons and compels it to halt its takeover of other nations would,” Netanyahu said.

He maintained there was nothing that could convince him to support the “very bad deal” reached in Lausanne.

“There’s no explanation that can convince me that the deal is a good deal for a simple reason,” Netanyahu said. “It’s a bad deal. A very bad deal. It is a deal that leaves Iran in possession of the capability to arm itself with nuclear weapons, that fills its coffers with a lot of money and that not only enables it to continue its terrorism and aggression in the Middle East and around the world but does not even demand that it stop doing so.”

Netanyahu’s comments came as several unnamed officials in Jerusalem warned that Iran was stepping up its arms support for Hezbollah and Hamas in past weeks.

Hours earlier, Russian President Vladmir Putin declared that the S-300 missiles would be supplied to Iran, completing an $800 million deal signed in 2007. At the time, the US and Israel both strongly opposed the sale of the air defense system, that was seen as a regional game-changer. In 2010, Russia froze delivery of the missiles, citing global sanctions against selling military equipment to Iran that were imposed as part of an effort to squeeze a deal out of the Islamic Republic over its controversial nuclear program.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and the Pentagon raised objections with Moscow over the plan. The White House said Kerry made the US opposition clear in a phone call to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The call came as Lavrov argued that the preliminary agreement over Iran’s nuclear program made the 2010 ban on sending missiles to Iran no longer necessary.

Experts say the S-300s would complicate any attempt at military intervention against Iranian nuclear facilities. Israel also fears they could be made available to Syria and Hezbollah, changing the balance of power in the region.

Although Iran claims the nuclear research is for peaceful purposes only, world powers fear it is aimed at developing atomic weapons.

The framework agreement marked a crucial advance in a 12-year standoff between Iran and the West, which disputes Tehran’s denial that it is seeking to build a nuclear bomb. However, Israeli officials, led by Netanyahu, have strongly condemned the deal for placing inadequate limitations on Iran’s ability to research and produce nuclear weapons.

Global powers must resolve a series of difficult technical issues by a June 30 deadline for a final deal, including the steps for lifting global sanctions imposed on Iran, and lingering questions over the possible military dimensions of its nuclear program.

12/04/2015| Press Release from Prime Ministers Office|  

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued the following statement:
 
"In the last few days, Iran has shown again why it can’t be trusted.
 
Iran insists on maintaining its formidable nuclear capabilities with which it could produce nuclear bombs. Iran insists on removing all sanctions immediately. And Iran refuses to allow effective inspections of all its suspect facilities. At the same time, Iran continues its unbridled aggression in the region and its terrorism throughout the world.
 
So let me reiterate again the two main components of the alternative to this bad deal: First, instead of allowing Iran to preserve and develop its nuclear capabilities, a better deal would significantly roll back these capabilities – for example, by shutting down the illicit underground facilities that Iran concealed for years from the international community. Second, instead of lifting the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear facilities and program at a fixed date, a better deal would link the lifting of these restrictions to an end of Iran’s aggression in the region, its worldwide terrorism and its threats to annihilate Israel.
 
Iran needs a deal more than anyone. Instead of making dangerous concessions to Iran, now is the time for the international community to reassert and fortify its original demands for a better deal.
 
We must not let Iran, the foremost sponsor of global terrorism, have an easy path to nuclear weapons which will threaten the entire world." 

A survey conducted by NBC News has found that 68 percent of Americans do not believe Iran will uphold its part of a final nuclear accord with six major powers. 

Iran and the P5+1 countries – the US, China, Russia, France, Great Britain and Germany – reached a framework deal with Tehran in Lausanne earlier this month, which framed the parameters of a larger, more technical agreement due by June 30.

A quarter of those surveyed in the NBC poll, which was conducted online April 6-8 and released on Thursday, said they trusted the Islamic Republic "to abide by a nuclear agreement."

Under the pact, cast as an "understanding," Iran will be allowed to continue the enrichment of uranium and will close no facilities.

53% of respondents said Iran's nuclear program constitutes a major threat to the United States. 37%, by comparison, said it was a minor threat, while 8% said it was no risk whatsoever. 

Also, half said they were following events unfolding throughout the nuclear talks quite closely, with more Republicans than Democrats staying tuned to news coming out of Switzerland.

The American TV network also asked participants who they trusted more to spearhead negotiations to curb Iran's nuclear program – US President Barack Obama or the Republicans in Congress – to which most (54%) returned with support for the president. 

Nearly two thirds of the 2,052 adults surveyed said they felt the country was heading in the wrong direction. As for Obama's job approval ratings – the poll, which was done in conjunction with SurveyMonkey, found that some 51% of Americans approved of "the way Barack Obama is handling his job as president" compared to 48% who disapproved. 

World powers and Iran have yet to agree on a fundamental component of the structure of a nuclear deal, with the main disagreement between the parties being how to couple international sanctions relief for Tehran with its demonstrated compliance with an accord.

The United States and its allies want to lift sanctions over time, providing little relief up front, whereas Iran wants full exemption from all EU and UN sanctions upon the initial implementation of a comprehensive agreement.

Israel’s minister of intelligence and strategic affairs, Yuval Steinitz, is at the forefront of his government’s very high-profile effort to expose perceived flaws and close loopholes in the world powers’ new framework nuclear deal with Iran. There’s just one problem, he says: There is no deal. In fact, there isn’t even a written framework.

Asked for his overall assessment of a deal hailed by the US as “historic,” Steinitz responded with a sigh and the plaintive lament: “The deal? I don’t understand anything about it.”

He then suggested that the framework was foggy and marked a pitiful precedent for international diplomacy: “Usually there’s a signed document, and then the sides argue about the interpretation. Now, they’re not arguing about the interpretation, but over the text. Because nothing was agreed. There is no text. In Lausanne, they didn’t manage to reach an agreement. So, to an extent, they fabricated understandings. Some are less clear. Some are more clear. But they weren’t written. And so there are different narratives. I don’t think there’s been an international agreement in the past that wasn’t written and signed.”

Still, from what Steinitz can discern amid the vagueness and conflicting narratives, he has pieced together a bleak picture. Echoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he said the non-written non-deal paves Iran’s path to the bomb — treating the regime “as though it can be trusted, like Holland or Japan.”

The root of the rot, he argued, was the decision by US-led world powers, about two years ago, to veer away from their previous insistence that Iran’s nuclear infrastructure be “dismantled and neutralized,” and opt instead for a “freeze and inspect” approach, which he said was “an unfortunately more minimal” path. Now, compounding that fundamental error, he said, came the recent porous understandings that neither freeze nor inspect effectively.

‘I don’t think there’s been an international agreement in the past that wasn’t written and signed’

In an interview with The Times of Israel on Wednesday, Steinitz stressed — for the benefit of those who criticize Israel’s ostensibly hard-line attitude — that “Israel didn’t change its position.” The “big mistake” was that the world powers did, he said, abandoning their demand to dismantle and neutralize, a demand that had produced a string of UN resolutions against an Iran that had “built a uranium enrichment project secretively and in breach of commitments.” The previous stance of the world powers known as the P5+1 had been “You want a peaceful nuclear program — well, fine, but no enrichment. Like Spain, Mexico, South Africa,” he said.

So Israel’s criticisms begin with that initial shift. The “overall approach is wrong,” said Steinitz. In Lausanne, however, the very vague terms of the understanding give every indication of failing even to ensure a competent, viable mechanism for the misguided “freeze and inspect” approach, he said.

For a start, he continued, the apparent terms do not freeze R&D on advanced centrifuges. Iran can thus continue to improve its centrifuges “legitimately” and break out to the bomb as soon as the restrictions on advanced centrifuges expire, in a little over a decade — the very flaw that President Barack Obama highlighted in his NPR interview on Monday, and which the State Department scrambled to explain away a day later.

Except that the right to ongoing R&D is actually more problematic than Obama acknowledged, said Steinitz. He posited that it would take Iran only about five years to complete the R&D on its IR-8 centrifuges, geared to enrich uranium 20 times faster than its current, basic line of IR-1s. “We’re not only worried about what happens in 10 years,” he said. “We’re worried that in five years, if and when their research is done, they will be able to break out to the bomb in two to three months. If they do break out, they can build 200 IR-8 centrifuges and install them in about two months,” and then produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb in a few weeks.

Steinitz said that the Iranians don’t yet have working IR-8 centrifuges; they are in development. When Foreign Minister Zarif and nuclear chief Salehi reportedly told MPs in Tehran that they’ll “inject gas” into their IR-8s on day one of the deal, Steinitz believes, they “apparently meant that they will be allowed to continue development from day one of the deal. They’ll put in a certain gas to check the models.”

The aftermath of the announcement of the deal has indeed been marked by diverging interpretations of the framework not only between Iran and the US but even between the US and France, which was on the same side of the negotiating table.

How will the IAEA be able to fully inspect and inspect what the regime is doing in the future, ‘if you don’t know where they’ve got to in the past’?

Then come the inspections, which Steinitz said were inadequately provided for in the Lausanne understandings. Iran, it appears, is still not being required to give a full accounting to the International Atomic Energy Agency on the possible military dimensions of its nuclear activities to date, he said. “And that is dangerous on a world level, since other countries will conclude that they too don’t have to give full answers to the IAEA — countries like Argentina, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.”

And as regards Iran itself, he asked, how will the IAEA be able to fully inspect and inspect what the regime is doing in the future, “if you don’t know where they’ve got to in the past — for example, on nuclear warheads?”

What’s worse, he pressed on, is that the understandings do not provide for critical “anywhere, anytime” inspections of any and all suspicious sites. How did Steinitz reach that conclusion? In part, from Obama’s New York Times interview. “Tom Friedman asked him, If there are military sites with nuclear activities, can there be ‘anywhere/anytime’ inspections? Obama said no. He said, We’d have to request that of the Iranians, and if the Iranians say no, there’ll have to be arbitration.”

(Steinitz, obviously, was paraphrasing. What Obama said was, “Obviously, a request will have to be made. Iran could object, but what we have done is to try to design a mechanism whereby once those objections are heard, that it is not a final veto that Iran has, but in fact some sort of international mechanism will be in place that makes a fair assessment as to whether there should be an inspection, and if they determine it should be, that’s the tiebreaker, not Iran saying, ‘No, you can’t come here.'”)

Steinitz was anything but persuaded. “We say that is ineffective. It will take time,” he said — time in which Iran can render suspicious sites less suspicious. “And, of course, if Israel or the UK or the US have intelligence that arouses suspicions, say, about two or three sites, military bases, facilities — these could be huge compounds — and there is an arbitration committee, Iran will deny the allegations. They’ll say, Show us proof. Well, we’re not going to give them our intelligence. We’re not going to expose our intelligence to the Iranians. So we think it’s useless.”

All of which, in Steinitz’s bleak conclusion, means that, “They claim that there’s a freeze and inspections, and we see loopholes.”

But what more can Israel do about this state of affairs, apart from gearing up to look after itself?

It couldn’t have made its objections any clearer. A month ago, Netanyahu was publicly lobbying Congress against the Obama-backed deal, to the president’s evident fury. Since last Thursday, the prime minister has been blitzing US media with his complaints. He asked that a final deal be conditioned on Iranian recognition of Israel; the president swatted the demand away. Steinitz on Monday asked 10 questions about the framework and listed a series of loophole-closing demands for a “more acceptable” deal. Hours later, Obama adviser Ben Rhodes went on his own Israeli TV blitz, effectively ruling out more stringent demands on Iran. The deal as it now stands meets the US’s “core objectives,” Rhodes told Channel 2. “We believe that this is the best deal that can emerge from these negotiations,” he reiterated to Channel 10.

Steinitz indicated he was undeterred by such tactical obstacles. “We’ll continue the dialogue with the US and with all the P5+1 players,” he promised. “We’ll keep expressing our positions. It is having an effect. There is American media resonance. The 10 questions that I raised, and my parameters for a more acceptable deal — when it was said that Israel wasn’t offering an alternative — are resonating.”

Steinitz insisted that the holes in the disputed parameters could yet be plugged, “if there is sufficient pressure on Iran.”

“If there is sufficient pressure,” he repeated, “I believe Iran will give in on all or most of these points,” he claimed, sounding just a little as though he was trying to convince the both of us. “If the Iranians see there’s no alternative, that they’ll be facing ever greater economic pressure, that there’s the risk of a military strike…”

He tailed off, then sallied forth again, on a slightly different, more idealistic tack: “The P5+1 shouldn’t be saying, What’s the alternative. Iran should be saying, What’s the alternative. Two years ago, when he was running for election, [President Hassan] Rouhani asked, What’s the alternative? We have to make concessions, he said. We have to save the economy, he said. Now, it’s Obama and the P5+1, the world’s powers, that are asking what’s the alternative.”

How to explain this grim reversal? I wondered. Is Obama a man of bad intentions?

“I certainly don’t think that the president has bad intentions,” Steinitz fired back rapidly and firmly. “I greatly appreciate his security guarantees to Israel, his commitment to Israel, the dialogue with Israel. Heaven forbid, I don’t accuse Obama or [Secretary of State John] Kerry of bad intentions, but they’re making a terrible mistake — one that recalls the 2007 North Korea deal, hailed by the whole world. Four years later, they had the bomb.”

If absolutely not malice, then, what’s driving the administration?

“I think there’s a delusion by Obama and Kerry and some European states,” Steinitz said, “that Zarif and Rouhani are moderates who represent moderates in Iran. They all said that Rouhani was different from Ahmadinejad, and that Iran would change for the better in the Rouhani era, and that if we just give Rouhani and Zarif sanctions relief, we’ll empower them vis-a-vis the Revolutionary Guards and [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei and the extreme factions.”

Instead, Steinitz argued, the opposite has played out. “Iran has not changed for the better. Iran has changed for the worse. Iran’s behavior is much more aggressive around the Middle East than it was under Ahmadinejad.”

It more openly supports terrorist groups and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon, he elaborated. It now openly talks about arming the Palestinians in the West Bank. And look at its support for the rebels in Yemen, he urged.

“The [previous] interim agreement, with its partial sanctions relief, didn’t encourage moderation,” Steinitz concluded. “The concept that you’ll empower the moderate Rouhani and Zarif was a very nice concept two years ago. But it’s totally unconnected with the facts on the ground.”