BICOM

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned Iran and Hezbollah that Israel is aware of their malign activities and “will not let you get away with it”.

Speaking to the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu exposed a secret Iranian nuclear warehouse just outside of Tehran, saying it could contain up to 300 tons of atomic material, and accused the International Atomic Energy Agency of ignoring secret Iranian nuclear archives in the Shor-abad District of Tehran that he presented earlier this year.

Netanyahu said Iran recently moved 15kg of radioactive material from the warehouse and “spread it around Tehran in an effort to hide the evidence”. “You have to ask yourself a question: Why did Iran keep a secret atomic archive and a secret atomic warehouse?” Netanyahu asked. “What Iran hides, Israel will find.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif described the Israeli presentation as an “arts and craft show”.

Netanyahu also revealed that Hezbollah is storing precision missiles in Beirut which can “target deep inside Israel within an accuracy of ten meters”. He said Hezbollah is “deliberately using the innocent people of Beirut as human shields,” and held up a visual aid that showed three missile storage sites; one in the Ouzai neighbourhood close to the runway, one underneath a football stadium, and a third adjacent to the airport. “Israel knows what you are doing, Israel knows where you are doing it, and Israel will not let you get away with it,” he warned.

Referring to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s earlier speech which branded Israel’s Nation-State Law a recipe for “apartheid,” Netanyahu said Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy full equal rights as Israeli citizens, and that the allegation is “the same old antisemitism with a brand new face. That’s all it is. Once it was the Jewish people who were slandered and held to a different standard. Today it is the Jewish state which is slandered and held to a different standard,” he maintained.

Netanyahu also said the JCPOA Iran nuclear deal “has had one positive consequence. By empowering Iran, it brought Israel and many Arab states closer together than ever before, in an intimacy and friendship that I have not seen in my lifetime, and that would have been unthinkable a few years ago”. Israel, he said, “deeply values these new friendships, and I hope the day will soon arrive when Israel will extend a formal peace, beyond Egypt and Jordan, to other Arab nations, including the Palestinians”.