BICOM

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a public warning to Iran and its “proxies” in Syria to halt aggression towards Israel. During his speech he held up a fragment of the Iranian drone that was shot down last week.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Netanyahu sent what he called “a message to the tyrants of Tehran”. He warned them to “not test Israel’s resolve. Israel will act not just against Iran’s proxies that are attacking us, but against Iran itself.” His comments followed escalating tension between the two countries after Israel shot down an Iranian drone that had entered Israeli airspace and launched airstrikes against the base it was sent from, losing an F-16 in the operation.

Speaking about the Syrian civil war, Netanyahu also conveyed a message to President Bashar Assad, stressing that Israel’s decision to stay out of the war for the last six years, except to grant humanitarian aid to thousands of Syrians in Israeli hospitals, could change. “If Mr. Assad invites Iran in militarily, that changes our position. So that is up to Iran and to Mr. Assad,” he said.

Netanyahu also criticised the Iranian nuclear agreement saying that the deal has “not made them more moderate internally, it has not made them more moderate externally. It released an Iranian tiger in our region”. He also said the inspection regime is completely insufficient, and that when the “sun sets” on the agreement in some 10 years time, the Iranians will have an “open highway” to build not only one nuclear device, but an entire nuclear arsenal.

Former US Secretary of State John Kerry, an architect of the nuclear agreement who was also speaking at the conference, called Netanyahu’s comments “fundamentally false”. He said: “If your house is on fire, are you going to refuse to put it out because you are concerned it will light on fire again in 15 years? Or are you going to put it out and use the intervening time to prevent it ever catching fire again?”

Taking the stage later on Sunday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif responded to Netanyahu’s accusations by telling the conference participants: “You were the audience for a cartoonish circus just this morning which does not even deserve the dignity of a response.”

He also denounced what he said were Israel’s “almost daily illegal incursions into Syrian airspace,” adding that Israel was trying “to create these cartoonish images to blame others for its own strategic blunders, or maybe to evade the domestic crisis they’re facing”.