WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A United Nations Security Council vote on a draft resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlements has been postponed, “potentially indefinitely”, a western diplomatic source said on Thursday.
Earlier, a western diplomat told Reuters that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had instructed Egypt’s U.N. mission to postpone the vote.
(Reporting By Matt Spetalnick; Writing by Yara Bayoumy; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
By Jeffrey Heller and Michelle Nichols
JERUSALEM/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump echoed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in urging the Obama administration on Thursday to veto a U.N. Security Council draft resolution that calls for an immediate halt to settlement building on occupied land Palestinians seek for a state.
Netanyahu took to Twitter in the dead of night in Israel to make the appeal, in a sign of concern that President Barack Obama might take a parting shot at a policy he has long opposed and at a right-wing Israeli leader with whom he has had a rocky relationship.
Hours later, Trump, posting on Twitter and Facebook, backed fellow conservative Netanyahu on one of the most contentious issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the pursuit – effectively stalled since 2014 – of a two-state solution.
“The resolution being considered at the United Nations Security Council regarding Israel should be vetoed,” Trump said.
“As the United States has long maintained, peace between the Israelis and Palestinians will only come through direct negotiations between the parties, and not through the imposition of terms by the United Nations.
“This puts Israel in a very poor negotiating position and is extremely unfair to all Israelis,” he wrote.
After Trump’s statement, a U.S. administration official said: “We have no comment at this time.”
Egypt circulated the draft on Wednesday evening and the 15-member council is due to vote at 3 p.m. ET (2000 GMT) on Thursday, diplomats said. It was unclear, they said, how the United States, which has protected Israel from U.N. action, would vote.
The resolution would demand Israel “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem”.
The White House declined to comment. Some diplomats hope Obama will allow Security Council action by abstaining on the vote.
Israel’s security cabinet was due to hold a special session at 1500 GMT to discuss the issue. Israeli officials voiced concern that passage of the resolution would embolden the Palestinians to seek international sanctions against Israel.
In Beirut, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told reporters that Paris was looking at the text of the resolution with great interest.
“The continuation of settlements is completely weakening the situation on the ground and creating a lot of tension,” he said. “It is taking away the prospect of a two-state solution. So this could reaffirm our disagreement with this policy.”
OBAMA CRITICAL OF SETTLEMENTS
Obama’s administration has been highly critical of settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. U.S. officials said this month, however, the president was not expected to make major moves on Israeli-Palestinian peace before leaving office.
Tweeting at 3:28 a.m., Netanyahu said the United States “should veto the anti-Israel resolution at the U.N. Security Council on Thursday”.
Israel’s far-right and settler leaders have been buoyed by the election of Trump, the Republican presidential candidate. He has already signaled a possible change in U.S. policy by appointing one his lawyers – a fundraiser for a major Israeli settlement – as Washington’s new ambassador to Israel.
Netanyahu, for whom settlers are a key component of his electoral base, has said his right-wing government has been their greatest ally since the capture of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in a 1967 war.
Some legislators in his right-wing Likud party have already suggested Israel declare sovereignty over the West Bank if the United States does not veto the resolution.
That prospect seemed unlikely, but Netanyahu could opt to step up building in settlements as a sign of defiance of Obama and support for settlers.
Israel considers all of Jerusalem its capital, a claim that is not recognized internationally.
In 2011, the United States vetoed a draft resolution condemning Israeli settlements after the Palestinians refused a compromise offer from Washington.
Israel’s U.N. ambassador Danny Danon said on Israeli Army Radio: “In a few hours we will receive the answer from our American friends.”
“I hope very much it will be the same one we received in 2011 when the version was very similar to the one proposed now and the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at the time, Susan Rice, vetoed it.”
The draft text says the establishment of settlements by Israel has “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law”.
It expresses grave concern that continuing settlement activities “are dangerously imperilling the viability of a two-state solution”.
The United States says continued Israeli settlement building lacks legitimacy, but has stopped short of adopting the position of many countries that it is illegal under international law. Some 570,000 Israelis live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
A resolution needs nine votes in favor and no vetoes by the United States, France, Russia, Britain or China to be adopted.
(Additional reporting by Susan Heavey in Washington and John Irish travelling with French foreign minister; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
By Ori Lewis
TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Israel has informed the United States that Lebanese Hezbollah fighters in Syria are using U.S. armored personnel carriers originally supplied to the Lebanese Army, a senior Israeli military officer said on Wednesday.
The U.S. State Department said last month that the American embassy in Beirut was working to investigate images on social media purporting to show Hezbollah, which supports President Bashar al-Assad, displaying U.S. military equipment in Syria.
Those images were widely reported to have been of U.S.-made M113 armored personnel carriers, which the State Department said were extremely common in the region.
In an intelligence briefing to foreign reporters in Tel Aviv, the senior officer showed a photograph of military vehicles, which he said included U.S.-made armored personnel carriers (APCs), along a road.
“These APCs are of the Hezbollah, while fighting in Syria, that they took from the Lebanese armed forces,” he said in English, describing the guerrilla group as dominant in Lebanon.
“We shared this information with other countries, including the U.S. of course, and I can even say that we recognized these specific APCs with some specific parameters that we know … these were given to the Lebanese armed forces. It’s not an assumption,” said the officer, who under the rules of the briefing could not be identified by name, rank or position.
Western diplomatic sources have said the APCs were delivered to the Lebanese Army by the United States as part of a program to equip that force.
The officer made no comment about when the APCs would have been supplied to the Lebanese Army.
The officer said Hezbollah has 8,000 fighters in Syria where more than 1,700 of the group’s combatants have been killed since 2011.
Israel and Hezbollah, which the officer said has 30,000 members, half of them combatants, last fought a war in 2006.
(Editing by Jeffrey Heller)
By Luke Baker
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The fall of Aleppo to Syrian government forces backed by Russia and Iran has heightened alarm in Israel about potential threats to its borders and a wider reshaping of the region.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left no doubt on Wednesday about the depth of Israel’s concern about Tehran, whose position and that of its proxies in Syria has been strengthened by the crushing of rebel resistance in Aleppo.
At a meeting in Astana with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, Netanyahu was asked whether he had a message for Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who is scheduled to visit Kazakhstan next week.
“Don’t threaten us. We are not a rabbit, we are a tiger,” the Jerusalem Post newspaper quoted Netanyahu as telling Nazarbayev. “If you threaten us, you endanger yourself.”
Asked by Nazarbayev if he seriously believed Iran wanted to destroy Israel, Netanyahu replied: “Yes, I do.”
The more than five-year-old civil war in Syria has enabled Iran, whose Supreme leader has called for an end to the Jewish state, to steadily increase its influence across the region.
Whether via its own Revolutionary Guard forces or Shi’ite Muslim proxies, especially Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, Tehran’s reach extends from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean Sea.
As well as concerns about an increased flow of arms now Iran has access to a port on the Mediterranean at Tartus, on the southern Syrian coast, Israel worries Hezbollah, emboldened by Iran’s patronage, may launch new attacks on its territory.
There have been isolated border incidents in recent months, and Israel and Hezbollah fought a war in 2006 in which more than 1,000 Lebanese and 160 Israelis were killed. Large populations in Israel and Lebanon were displaced and major infrastructure in southern Lebanon and parts of Beirut was destroyed.
While Hezbollah’s ranks have suffered in the fighting in Syria — Israeli officials estimate 1,700 fighters have been killed and 7,000 wounded — the group has restocked its weaponry and retains an arsenal of at least 100,000 rockets, Israeli and independent analysts say.
In recent weeks, unclaimed airstrikes have targeted southern Syria and near Damascus. Syria has pointed the finger at Israel, which has made no comment. But Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said last week Israel was working “to prevent the smuggling of sophisticated weapons, military equipment and weapons of mass destruction from Syria to Hezbollah.”
WARY OF IRAN
Avi Dichter, the chair of Israel’s foreign affairs and defence committee and the former head of the Shin Bet intelligence agency, said Iran had tried several times in the past to move forces into the Syrian Golan Heights, next to territory that Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
Those moves were repelled, Dichter told Reuters. But he said that, with Iran flush with cash and confidence after last year’s agreement restricting Iran’s nuclear program, it was possible further attempts would be made to test Israel’s responses.
“Iran has a strategic plan,” he said. “It might bring Iranian troops closer to Israel, either Revolutionary Guards, who are pure Iranians, or others, like Hezbollah or the Basij militia, which might be a very good cover for them.”
Beyond the threat from Iran and its proxies, Dichter has warned that Israel, widely thought to be the only nuclear capable state in the Middle East despite maintaining a policy of ambiguity, must not put too much confidence in Russia. The Israeli government sees Moscow as an ally but Dichter says it could shift position if its interests are threatened.
Dichter believes Russia has long-term aspirations in the Middle East which could bring fundamental changes to the borders of the region, depending largely on how incoming U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin interact.
“Those two leaders might not just think but act in order to create what we call a new Middle East,” Dichter said.
He called Russia the “supreme decider” in Syria but made clear the immediate concerns were Iran and Hezbollah.
“We have no intention to allow Hezbollah to test their sophisticated weapons because there are no other targets in the Middle East except Israel when Hezbollah and Iran think about an offensive initiative,” said Dichter. “By all means Israel is going to stop it, never mind whether by alerts or activities or any other tools.”
(Editing by Timothy Heritage)
RAMALLAH/PARIS (Reuters) – France will postpone a proposed Middle East peace conference in Paris to January next year, Voice of Palestine radio reported on Wednesday, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refusing to participate and U.S. attendance in doubt.
France has been trying to persuade Netanyahu, who has repeatedly rejected the conference proposal, to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the French capital to try to revive moribund peace talks between the two sides.
Voice of Palestine radio quoted Palestinian Ambassador to France Salman El Herfi as saying that Paris had informed the Palestinians of its delay to the peace conference until January “to make better preparations”.
It said Herfi would meet French officials on Wednesday to discuss the issue and that he had said that if Israel refused to come in January, the international conference would still go ahead, but without the main protagonists.
Asked to comment on the situation, a spokesman for the French foreign ministry replied: “As of now, France has never officially confirmed any date for this conference. We will do so once we have had the results of our talks with all the parties concerned.”
France has repeatedly tried to breathe new life into the peace process this year, holding a preliminary conference in June where the United Nations, European Union, United States and major Arab countries gathered to discuss proposals without the Israelis or Palestinians present.
The plan was to hold a follow-up conference before Christmas with the Israelis and Palestinians involved to see whether the two sides could be brought back to negotiations.
The conference of foreign ministers was aimed at agreeing on a joint statement that would reaffirm the two-state solution on the basis of pre-1967 borders and according to Security Council resolutions, diplomats said.
The Palestinian mission in Paris was not immediately available for comment.
(Reporting by Ali Sawafta and John Irish; Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Ralph Boulton)
By Ori Lewis
NEVATIM AIR BASE, Israel (Reuters) – – Israel on Monday became the first country after the United States to receive the U.S.-built F-35 stealth jet which will increase its ability to attack distant targets, including Iran.
The much-hyped arrival of the first two fighter jets was overshadowed by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s tweet that Lockheed Martin’s whole F-35 project was too expensive, and the delivery was delayed for hours by bad weather preventing their take-off from Italy.
The squadron is expected to be the first operational outside the United States. The planes are the first of 50, costing around $100 million each.
“Our long arm has now become longer and mightier,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Nevatim air base in the southern Negev desert.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter, also attending the ceremony which was delayed until after dark, said the planes were critical to maintaining Israel’s military edge in the region.
A U.S. squadron of the planes, which have suffered delays and cost overruns, became operational in August. The F-35 program is the Pentagon’s largest weapons project.
“The F-35 program and cost is out of control,” Trump said on Twitter, sending Lockheed Martin’s shares down 4 percent.
Jeff Babione, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 programme leader, said the company understood concerns about affordability and had invested millions of dollars to try to reduce its price.
Israel, which finalised a 10-year, $38 billion arms deal from the United States this year, plans to maintain two F-35 squadrons.
Critics of the plane say it can carry a smaller weapons payload and has a shorter range than Israel’s current squadrons of U.S.-built F-15s and F-16s.
But some experts say the F-35’s stealth capabilities make up for this because it can be more accurate and fly a more direct route to its target. Israel’s air force mostly flies missions close to home, in the Gaza Strip and against arms shipments to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria.
It is also believed to have carried out bombings in Sudan against arms shipments to Palestinian militants, and to have drawn up contingency plans against Iranian nuclear facilities.
Israel initially ordered 33 of the fighters but signed off on another 17 last month.
Nimrod Shefer, a retired Israeli air force major-general, said the new aircraft were a welcome addition.
“(There are) very low- to very high-altitude missiles … and targets that are becoming more and more difficult to detect and to destroy,” he said.
(Writing by Ori Lewis and Maayan Lubell; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Robin Pomeroy)
By Ori Lewis
NEVATIM AIR BASE, Israel (Reuters) – – The much-hyped arrival in Israel of its first two U.S.-built F-35 fighter jets was heavily disrupted on Monday after bad weather delayed their take-off from Italy.
The delay – plus U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s complaints on Twitter that Lockheed Martin’s whole F-35 project was far too expensive – overshadowed what was a day of celebration in Israel.
The ceremony was pushed back until after nightfall at the Nevatim air base in the southern Negev desert. It was due to be attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter.
Israel’s F-35 squadron is expected to be the first to be operational outside the United States and will enhance its ability to attack distant targets using stealth. The two planes will be the first of 50 fighters, each priced at around $100 million, Israel’s air force will receive.
A U.S. squadron of the planes, which have encountered many delays and cost overruns, become operational in August. The F-35 program is the Pentagon’s largest weapons project.
“The F-35 program and cost is out of control,” Trump said on Twitter, sending Lockheed Martin’s shares down 4 percent.
Asked about Trump’s criticism, Jeff Babione, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 program leader, said the company understood concerns about affordability and had invested millions of dollars to try to reduce the jet’s price.
Israel, which finalised a 10-year, $38 billion package of defence assistance from the United States this year, plans to maintain two F-35 squadrons after it receives all the aircraft it has ordered.
Critics of the plane have said it can carry a smaller weapons payload and has a shorter range than Israel’s current battle-tested squadrons of U.S. built F-15s and F-16s.
But some experts say the F-35’s stealth capabilities make up for this because it can be more accurate and can fly a more direct route to its potential target. Israel’s air force mostly flies missions close to home, in the Gaza Strip and against arms shipments to Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon and Syria.
It also is widely believed to have carried out bombings in Sudan against arms shipments to Palestinian militants, and to have drawn up contingency plans against Iranian nuclear facilities.
Israel initially ordered 33 of the fighters but signed off on another 17 last month.
Nimrod Shefer, a retired Israeli air force major-general, told reporters the new aircraft would be a welcome addition in ever more challenging and diverse battlefield environments.
“(There are) very low- to very high-altitude missiles … and targets that are becoming more and more difficult to detect and to destroy,” said Shefer.
(Writing by Ori Lewis and Maayan Lubell; Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Alison Williams)
By Jeffrey Heller
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has resumed his attacks on a nuclear deal with Iran, seeking Donald Trump’s help to smash a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s foreign policy legacy.
Following up on remarks he made this month to a Washington think tank, the conservative Israeli prime minister said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday “there are ways, various ways of undoing” last year’s accord.
The Republican president-elect is also no fan of the deal between Iran and six world powers under which Tehran agreed to suspend a suspected drive to develop atomic weapons in return for a lifting of most sanctions against it.
During the U.S. election campaign, Trump called the pact – against which Netanyahu lobbied long and hard – a “disaster” and “the worst deal ever negotiated”. But he has also said it would be hard to overturn an agreement enshrined in a U.N. resolution.
Asked if he had any ideas on how to unravel the deal, Netanyahu said on the television program: “Yeah, I have about five things in my mind”. Pressed for specifics, he said: “I’ll talk about it with President Trump.”
That discussion will likely take place soon after Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. Shortly after the election, Netanyahu said he and Trump had agreed to meet at the first opportunity.
Scrapping the deal would, at the very least, be complicated.
“It’s difficult to see the advantage for the U.S. in abrogating the deal at this stage,” said Jacob Parakilas, an expert on U.S. foreign policy at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.
“It would be nearly impossible to convince Europe, Russia and China to restore their sanctions on Iran in the absence of clear evidence of Iranian violations of the deal. So any sanctions the U.S. restored would have much less impact on the Iranian economy,” he said.
Yair Lapid, an Israeli opposition leader, said he doubted whether the deal could be undone given “the Chinese, Russians and Europeans are already in Iran signing deals”, and he said any discussion on it should take place “behind closed doors”.
In the run-up to Trump’s inauguration, Netanyahu has been laying the groundwork for a closer relationship with Trump.
The two met in September on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York, when the Israeli leader also held talks with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. A week after the election, Netanyahu sent his U.S. ambassador, Ron Dermer, to see the president-elect and his transition team.
Dermer hailed Trump as “a true friend of Israel”.
CHEMISTRY
Netanyahu has used similar language to describe Obama, but the superlatives have done little to mask a lack of personal chemistry and a relationship strained by policy differences over Iran and Jewish settlement on occupied land.
In recent months, however, Netanyahu had largely refrained from attacking the Iran deal as Israel finalised a 10-year, $38 billion military aid package with the Obama administration.
Nearly a year ago, the commander of Israel’s armed forces, Lieutenant-General Gadi Eisenkot, offered a nuanced view of a deal that Netanyahu had dubbed a historic mistake. The agreement, Eisenkot said in a speech, presented many risks but also “many opportunities”.
Trump, himself, could also face opposition from within his new administration to cancelling the Iran deal.
James Mattis, the former general who Trump said he intends to nominate as secretary of defence, has called for strict enforcement of the agreement but stopped short of calling for its abrogation.
“It may be possible in time to build up support for a multilateral restoration of sanctions,” Parakilas said. “But at the moment that’s just not really the case – and ending U.S. participation in the deal right now would make it more, not less, difficult.”
Last year, before the agreement was signed, Netanyahu angered the White House by addressing the U.S. Congress, where he argued that the deal would pave Iran’s path to nuclear arms.
Three years earlier, he famously held up a cartoon bomb at the United Nations, drawing a red line just below a label reading “final stage” to a nuclear device.
But Netanyahu seemed to backtrack in the interview.
Asked if Iran, which has denied seeking atomic weapons, would move quickly towards a bomb if the agreement was undone, Netanyahu said that was not the case prior to its signing.
“I think Iran didn’t rush to the bomb before there was a deal,” he said.
“Really?” his questioner asked.
“No, because they were afraid of retribution,” Netanyahu said.
(Editing by Luke Baker and Alison Williams)
By Rinat Harash
KISUFIM, Israel (Reuters) – A battalion of soldiers crawls across the desert sand with assault rifles cocked. It’s a routine exercise, but these are no ordinary troops – they are Arabs who have chosen to fight for the Jewish state.
While the vast majority of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are Jews – and nearly all their conflicts have been against Arab nations – a trickle of Israeli Arabs volunteer for the army.
Most are Bedouin, a community native to southern Israel. But some are other Arab citizens of Israel, the descendants of Palestinians who remained during the 1948 war of the state’s founding, when hundreds of thousands of their brethren fled or were forced from their homes by advancing Israeli troops.
“Why did I decide to enlist?” asks Sergeant Yusef Salutta, a 20-year-old Arab from the north of Israel who serves with the Desert Reconnaissance Battalion. The army rarely grants journalists access to the unit.
“Because I’m from this country and I love the country and I want to contribute,” he said. “Everyone should enlist, anybody who lives here should enlist.”
Yussef Saluta, 20, an Israeli Arab soldier from the Desert Reconnaissance battalion takes part in a drill near Kissufim in southern Israel November 29, 2016. REUTERS/Amir Cohen
The military conscripts young Jewish men and women, but not Arabs. It does not report exact numbers of Arab volunteers, but officials say there are several hundred among the 175,000 active personnel.
A silver Star of David necklace hung around Salutta’s neck, and he chatted with fellow-soldiers in Hebrew.
At a time when Israel is expanding its settlements in the West Bank and Palestinians fear they may never end up with their own state, some Israeli Arabs see volunteering for the military as betrayal.
“This phenomenon, we totally reject it,” said Ahmad Tibi, an Israeli-Arab member of parliament.
“What could go through a person’s mind when he serves against his people? We try to educate people that this is not the way.”
Volunteers say their families are supportive, and that they are prepared to take criticism.
“I don’t care about them,” said Salutta. “I need to be part of the country, to be like everybody else.”
The head of the IDF Minorities Unit, Colonel Wajdi Sarhan, said some Israeli-Arabs saw service as a way to improve their chances in life.
“(It) can get easier when you hold an Israeli soldier or reservist ID card,” said Sarhan.
“To be a soldier in the army, it’s actually an identity certificate of Israeli-ness, which can help integration.”
Israeli soldiers from the Desert Reconnaissance battalion take part in a drill near the Gaza Strip in southern Israel November 29, 2016. REUTERS/Amir Cohen
He said some recruits faced threats and harassment at home from fellow Israeli-Arabs. In some cases, they are allowed to travel to and from military duty out of uniform.
When it comes to Israel’s decades-old conflict against the Palestinians, there is no question – if they are required to fight, they must.
“I assume that anyone who decided to be a combat soldier in such a unit took this into consideration in advance,” said Sarhan.
(Writing by Luke Baker; editing by Andrew Roche)
By Jeffrey Heller and Arshad Mohammed
JERUSALEM/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday he would discuss with Donald Trump the West’s “bad” nuclear deal with Iran after the U.S. president-elect enters the White House.
Speaking separately to a conference in Washington, Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry clashed over the Iran deal and Israel’s settlement construction on the occupied West Bank, which Kerry depicted as an obstacle to peace.
During the U.S. election campaign, Trump, a Republican, called last year’s nuclear pact a “disaster” and “the worst deal ever negotiated”. He has also said it would be hard to overturn an agreement enshrined in a U.N. resolution.
“Israel is committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. That has not changed and will not change. As far as President-elect Trump, I look forward to speaking to him about what to do about this bad deal,” Netanyahu told the Saban Forum, a conference on the Middle East, in Washington, via satellite from Jerusalem. Trump takes office on Jan. 20.
Netanyahu has been a harsh critic of the nuclear deal, a legacy foreign policy achievement for Democratic President Barack Obama. But he had largely refrained from attacking the pact in recent months as Israeli and U.S. negotiators finalised a 10-year, $38 billion military aid package for Israel.
Before the nuclear agreement, Netanyahu, a conservative, strained relations with the White House by addressing the U.S. Congress in 2015 and cautioning against agreeing to the pact.
The Obama administration promoted the deal as a way to suspend Tehran’s suspected drive to develop atomic weapons. In return, Obama agreed to lift most sanctions against Iran. Tehran denies ever having considered developing nuclear arms.
Under the deal, Iran committed to reducing the number of its centrifuges by two-thirds, capping its level of uranium enrichment well below the level needed for bomb-grade material, reducing its enriched uranium stockpile from around 10,000 kg to 300 kg for 15 years, and submitting to international inspections to verify its compliance.
“The problem isn’t so much that Iran will break the deal, but that Iran will keep it because it just can walk in within a decade, and even less … to industrial-scale enrichment of uranium to make the core of an arsenal of nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu told the forum.
‘NO, NO, NO AND NO’
Appearing later in person, Kerry defended the deal, arguing its monitoring provisions provided the ability to detect any significant uptick in Iran’s nuclear programs, “in which case every option that we have today is available to us then.”
Kerry pushed Israel to rein in construction of Jewish settlements on West Bank land it occupied in a 1967 war that the Palestinians want for a state. He also bluntly rejected the idea advanced by some Israelis that Israel might make a separate peace with Arab nations that share its concerns about Iran.
“No, no, no and no,” Kerry said. “There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace.”
On settlements, Kerry said: “There’s a basic choice that has to be made by Israelis … and that is, are there going to be continued settlements … or is there going to be separation and the creation of two states?”
The central issues to be resolved in the conflict include borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state, the future of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which most nations regard as illegal, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem.
(Additional reporting by Larry King; Editing by Peter Cooney)