At an assembly of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency in al-Quds (Jerusalem) on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the United States and the European Union not to let up sanctions against Tehran.
The Israeli premier said the illegal sanctions have crippled Iran and that Tehran should not be allowed to have a single centrifuge at its nuclear facilities.
“This is the deal that is proposed now. Iran does not roll back its nuclear making capacities at all but the P5+1 are rolling back sanctions. That’s a bad deal. It’s a dangerous deal,” Bibi said.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State John Kerry reassured Tel Aviv that Washington would not enter into what has been described as a bad deal with Iran.
“We are not blind and I don’t think we are stupid. I think we have a pretty strong sense of how to measure whether or not we are acting in the interest of our country and of the globe and particularly of our allies like Israel, and [Persian] Gulf states, and others in the region. We are absolutely determined that this would be a good deal or there would be no deal,” Kerry told the American TV channel NBC.
“That’s why it’s hard. That’s why we didn’t close the deal here in the last couple of days. Because we are together unified, pushing for things that we believe provides the guarantees that Israel and the rest of the world demand,” he added.
Kerry also said the US would maintain the “current architecture of sanctions,” against Iran.
The closed-door talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council -- Britain, Russia, China, France and the US -- plus Germany began in Geneva, Switzerland, on Thursday and ended on Sunday.
In a joint press conference with EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said progress was made during the “productive” talks and that the two sides had reached an agreement on a number of issues.
Ashton, for her part, also said that the two sides had made “concrete progress” in the talks, which she described as “intense and constructive.”
Since 1958, when Israel began building its Dimona plutonium -- and uranium --processing facility in the Negev desert, it has secretly manufactured numerous nuclear warheads, making it the only player in the Middle East that possesses nuclear weapons.
The United States, Israel and some of their allies falsely claim that Iran is pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear energy program, with the US and the European Union using the unfounded allegation as a pretext to impose illegal sanctions on Iran.
Tehran strongly rejects the claim against its nuclear energy program, maintaining that as a committed signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency it has the right to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.