Iran denies Netanyahu’s ‘obscene’ nuclear accusations

Following Netanyahu’s revelation of evidence related to an Iranian “secret atomic warehouse,” Iran’s FM denied the allegations.

By: AP and World Israel News Staff

Iran’s foreign minister denounced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s allegations against Tehran at the U.N. General Assembly as an “obscene charge,” the state-run IRNA news agency reported Friday.

The response came after Netanyahu on Thursday claimed at the General Assembly that Iran has a “secret atomic warehouse” on Tehran’s outskirts and challenged U.N. inspectors to examine it.

It was unclear whether Netanyahu’s announcement sheds new light on what U.N. inspectors already know, or whether it was intended to prove that Iran has been violating the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with world powers that followed years of Western sanctions over the country’s contested atomic program.

The 2015 nuclear deal called on Iran to drastically limit its enrichment of uranium — a pathway to atomic-grade weapons — in exchange for the lifting of crushing economic sanctions.

While Iran has long denied seeking nuclear weapons and claimed its program is for peaceful purposes only, Israel produced evidence this year gathered during a Mossad raid of an Iranian facility that Netanyahu says refutes Iran’s claims of innocence.

In April, Netanyahu displayed and summarized a half-ton of purported Iranian documents related to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, which Israeli agents spirited away from a facility in Tehran’s Shourabad neighborhood.

In May, President Donald Trump pulled America out of the nuclear deal, in part due to Tehran’s program to develop ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, its “malign behavior” in the Mideast and its support of terror groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

The Trump administration has also been re-imposing sanctions on Iran, plunging its economy further into a downward spiral.

For his part, Zarif tweeted that Israel’s the only one with an “undeclared” nuclear weapons program in the region and that it should open it to international inspectors.

The spokesman of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Bahram Ghasemi, said Netanyahu’s accusation was “not worth talking about.”

“These farcical claims and the show by the prime minister of the occupying regime [Israel] were not unexpected,” Ghasemi added.