Iranian defense minister: Israel should set red lines for itself

Israel should draw a red line for itself, not for Tehran, Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi said Saturday in a speech quoted by AFP.

Referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the General Assembly, Vahidi said Netanyahu should be informed that “if having the atomic bomb is passing the red line, the Zionist regime, that possesses dozens of nuclear warheads and weapons of mass destruction, has passed the red line years ago, and it has to be stopped.”

In Netanyahu’s Thursday speech, the prime minister drew a red line at the top of a cartoon bomb and warned that without red lines, Iran would cross the threshold of military nuclear capability.

On Friday, Netanyahu reiterated that setting a red line “could prevent the need for a military operation” against Iran.

Voices in Tehran reacted harshly to Netanyahu’s speech.

“Is the occupying and aggressor Zionist regime that possesses nuclear weapons more dangerous? Or an Iran that doesn’t have nuclear weapons and which insists more than anybody on nuclear disarmament, and seeks only to have peaceful nuclear energy abiding by international rules?” Vahidi reportedly asked.

On Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, who also serves as chair of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), said that his country was a victim of “nuclear terrorism.”

“As a country [where] not only [its] nationals have been targeted by terrorist groups, but also its nuclear facilities have been subject to cyber attacks and foreign-backed sabotage, we attach special importance to the need to prevent nuclear terrorism,” the semi-official Fars news agency quoted the foreign minister as saying.