Netanyahu: Iran seeking to attack Israel from Yemen with precision-guided missiles

Netanyahu said on Monday that Iran was attempting to deploy advanced weaponry in Yemen to threaten Israel and other countries in the region.

By Benjamin Kerstein, The Algemeiner

During a press conference in Jerusalem with visiting U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Iran is seeking to develop now precision-guided munitions, missiles that can hit any target in the Middle East with a circumference of five to ten meters.”

“They want to place them in Iraq and in Syria, and to convert Lebanon’s arsenal of 130,000 statistical rockets to precision-guided munitions,” Netanyahu continued. “They seek also to develop that, and have already begun to put that in Yemen, with the goal of reaching Israel from there too.”

Netanyahu emphasized the global threat posed by the Tehran regime, saying, “We view Iran as the greatest threat to peace, stability, and our security, and the security of many others. They fired into Saudi Arabia. They’ve interfered with international shipping lanes. They’ve attacked Americans and they’ve killed Americans throughout the last ten years in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”

“Iran is the single greatest threat to stability and peace in the Middle East,” he added. “That doesn’t mean that there are no others. There are. We are, the Middle East is rich with several things, and one of them is terrorist-exporting nations and groups.”

Referring to the death this weekend of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a US special forces operation, Netanyahu emphasized, “While there’s a tremendous achievement yesterday in the action against the leader of [Islamic State], there still remains a massive effort against the other forces of terror, and the nation, the terror-state of Iran.”