Netanyahu: ‘Absurd’ to continue nuclear talks after Iranian missile attack

“The desperate rush to sign this flawed nuclear agreement with Iran is not only absurd, it’s downright dangerous.”

By World Israel News Staff

Opposition leader and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed European and American officials for continuing nuclear negotiations with Iran after the Islamic Republic launched a missile attack that struck the U.S. consulate in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

“The desperate rush to sign this flawed nuclear agreement with Iran is not only absurd, it’s downright dangerous,” Netanyahu said in an English-language video posted to his official Facebook and Twitter pages.

“Yesterday, Iran fired missiles in the vicinity of the American consulate in Iraq, and the US continues to charge ahead, along with the other powers, to sign a nuclear agreement that will give the ayatollahs a nuclear arsenal,” he continued.

While initial reports indicated that the American consulate was the intended target of a barrage of Iranian-launched missiles, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said Sunday that she believed the Iranians had not actually aimed to hit the consulate.

An Iranian government statement said that the missiles had struck “secret Israeli bases” in Iraq, though it provided no evidence to support that claim.

Netanyahu charged that the deal would “relieve sanctions and give [Iran] hundreds of billions of dollars in order to continue the terror that they waged yesterday and wage every day throughout the Middle East and the world.”

He added that “this agreement is even worse than its predecessor, because in three years’ time, under this agreement, Iran will be a threshold nuclear state. It will have enough enriched uranium to create dozens and dozens of nuclear bombs, and it will have the ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles] to deliver them to any place in the United States.”

Addressing Americans and beseeching them to hold their leaders accountable, Netanyahu said that “we cannot allow a rogue terrorist regime like Iran to have nuclear weapons. Have we learned nothing?”