From the Liveblog of
Monday, November 18, 2024
Netanyahu says Israel’s retaliatory strike on Iran hit component of its nuke program
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GooglePrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that Israel’s retaliatory attack on Iran last month degraded its defense and missile production capabilities and also hit an element of its nuclear program.
“It’s not a secret, it has been published,” Netanyahu says in a Knesset speech. “There is a specific component in their nuclear program that was hit in this attack.”
However, Netanyahu adds that Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon has not been blocked. Iran nuclear “program itself, its capacity to act here, has not yet been thwarted. We’ve delayed it… but it has progressed” over the past few years. Iran has “advanced its enrichment; it still has a long way to go in other areas.” The imperative to stop Iran’s march to the bomb “is on us.”
He says he has discussed this with both President Biden and, recently, with President-elect Trump.
Israel’s April strike on Iran, he says, took out one of four Russian-supplied S-300 surface-to-air missile defense batteries around Tehran.
In October, he says, Israel destroyed the remaining three batteries and caused serious damage to Iran’s ballistic missile production capabilities and its ability to produce solid fuel, which is used in long-range ballistic missiles.
Last week, the Axios news site revealed that Israel destroyed an active nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin during last month’s attack on Iran.
The Times of Israel Community.