Netanyahu: Iran Hiding ‘Secret Atomic Warehouse’

TEL AVIV – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday accused Iran of hiding another nuclear site, and slammed the International Atomic Energy Agency for its failure to launch a probe following Israel’s April unveiling of the Iranian nuclear program archive.

Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, Netanyahu said Israeli spies had located “a secret atomic warehouse for storing massive amounts of equipment and material from Iran’s secret nuclear weapons programme,” proof, he asserted, that Iran had not ended its nuclear program.

“Iran has not abandoned its goal to develop nuclear weapons. … Rest assured that will not happen. What Iran hides, Israel will find,” he added.

Netanyahu also charged Iran with hiding precision missile warehouses in the Lebanese capital of Beirut for its terror proxy Hezbollah. In his address, the Israeli prime minister warned that Israel would do what it takes to prevent Iranian aggression “wherever and whenever,” hailed President Donald Trump for defunding the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, and lambasted the Palestinian Authority for its pay-for-slay scheme that funds stipends to convicted terrorists and their families.

Regarding the news of the nuclear site in Iran, Netanyahu called on IAEA director-general Yukiya Amano to “do the right thing” and “go and inspect this atomic warehouse immediately — before the Iranians finish cleaning it out.” Inspect “right here, right now,” he urged, “and inspect the other sites we told you about. … Tell the world the truth about Iran.”

Netanyahu accused the IAEA of neglecting to follow up on Israeli intel on the nuclear sites, including more than 100,000 files that were smuggled by Israeli spies out of the Islamic Republic and presented by the prime minister earlier this year.

Addressing “the tyrants of Iran,” he said: “Israel knows what you’re doing, and Israel knows where you’re doing it.” The Jewish state, he vowed, would “never let a regime that calls for our destruction develop nuclear weapons.”

“Israel will do whatever it must do to defend itself against Iran’s aggression,” he stated. “We will continue to act against you in Syria, we will act against you in Lebanon, we will act against you in Iraq, we will act against you wherever and whenever we must act to defend our state and to defend our people.”

“The same week Iran was caught red-handed for trying to murder European citizens, European leaders were laying out the red carpet for President Rouhani, pledging to give them more money,” Netanyahu said. “Have these European leaders learned nothing from history? Will they ever wake up?”

Netanyahu lauded Trump and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley for the “support they provide to Israel at the United Nations.”

He slammed as “preposterous” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s accusation made in a speech earlier in the day that the recently passed nation-state law constituted “apartheid.”

“Israel’s Arab citizens have exactly the same rights as all other Israeli citizens. But here Israel is shamefully accused of apartheid,” Netanyahu said. “It’s the same old anti-Semitism with a brand new face. That’s all it is. Once it was the Jewish people who were slandered and held to a different standard. Today it is the Jewish state which is slandered and held to a different standard.”

“Israel is called racist for making Hebrew its national language? This is downright preposterous,” he said, citing more than 50 countries that have crosses or crescents on their flags and “dozens of countries that define themselves as the nation-state of their peoples. None of these countries are libeled for celebrating their national identity.”

Addressing Abbas, Netanyahu said, “They more they slay, the more you pay.” He called out the Palestinian leader on his hypocrisy, saying, “and you condemn Israel’s morality? You call Israel racist? This is not the way to peace. This body should not be applauding the head of a regime that pays terrorists. The UN should condemn such a despicable policy.”

Abbas in his speech had called Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons “heroes” and said the PA pays stipends to “our hero martyrs and prisoners of war.”

The Iran deal, Netanyahu said, “has had one positive consequence. By empowering Iran, it brought Israel and many Arab states closer together than ever before, in an intimacy and friendship that I have not seen in my lifetime, and that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.”

Israel “deeply values these new friendships, and I hope the day will soon arrive when Israel will extend a formal peace, beyond Egypt and Jordan, to other Arab nations, including the Palestinians,” he added.