fbpx

News

Netanyahu, Trump discuss Iranian threat in phone call

[ssba]

Israel’s Prime Minister spoke to the US President yesterday and discussed the dangers posed by Iran to the region.

A statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that during the phone conversation with US President Donald Trump, “the two leaders spoke at length about the dangers posed by the nuclear deal with Iran and by Iran’s malevolent behaviour in the region and about the need to work together to counter those dangers”.

The statement added that Netanyahu thanked Trump for his “warm hospitality” during his visit to the White House last month. Netanyahu also thanked Trump “for his comments at the beginning of his speech before the Joint Session of Congress condemning anti-Semitism”.

The call with Trump comes after Iran has conducted a number of ballistic missile tests in the past few months, violating the spirit of several UN Security Council resolutions. Iran said it successfully tested the S-300 anti-missile system for the first time over the weekend. Yesterday, an American naval vessel was harassed by Iranian boats in the Straits of Hormuz.

Also yesterday, Netanyahu spoke at a Foreign Ministry ceremony to mark 25 years since the 1992 bombing of Israel’s Embassy in Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires, which killed 29 people. Israel believes that Iran was behind the attack.

Netanyahu said that “Iran initiated and planned it, and Hezbollah, which does what it [Iran] says, carried it out”.

He condemned Iran as “the greatest generator of terrorism in the world” and said they needed to “fight this terror” because it is just “one arm of Iranian aggression, which also seeks nuclear weapons and advances its ballistic missiles programme”.

Netanyahu will travel to Moscow later this week, where he will meet Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday that he will use the opportunity to express opposition towards Iran’s attempt “to base itself permanently in Syria” and its “gradual attempt to open a front against us on the Golan Heights”.