Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar praised Iran’s support for the terrorist organization. Photo: FIle.

Iran’s admission that it is providing military and financial support to the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas is a potential violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2231 – which prohibits the Tehran regime from exporting weapons without the Security Council’s approval, Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the UN, said on Thursday.

Accusing Iran of showing its “true colors,” Haley’s remarks came after Yahya Sinwar – a Hamas military leader who currently serves as Prime Minister of Hamas-controlled Gaza – praised Iran earlier this week for providing “strategic military support” to the terrorist organization. This was a “stunning admission,” Haley said.

“Iran must decide whether it wants to be a member of the community of nations that can be expected to take its international obligations seriously, or whether it wants to be the leader of a jihadist terrorist movement,” Haley declared in a statement. “It’s long past time for the international community to hold Iran to the same standard that all countries who actually value peace and security are held to.”

The brazen restoration of ties between Hamas and Tehran, which had been badly damaged by the advent of the Syrian civil war, further compounded Haley’s frustration with Iran this week concerning its compliance with the Iran nuclear deal of 2015. American calls for the inspection of military sites in Iran by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – which are permitted under the Additional Protocol of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the Iran agreement is known – were rebuffed this week by the Iranians, who ridiculed the demand as “merely a dream.”

“If inspections of Iranian military sites are ‘merely a dream,’ as Iran says, then Iranian compliance with the JCPOA is also a dream,” Haley said.

The US push for IAEA inspections in Iran faced a further obstacle from the agency itself on Thursday afternoon. Despite Haley’s visit to the agency’s headquarters in Vienna last week, during which she warned that there are “numerous undeclared sites that have not been inspected,” the IAEA said it would be not be pressing Iran to allow inspectors. While the IAEA’s official reason for not submitting a request is that the US has reportedly not provided credible indications of nuclear activity at these sites, critics of the Iran deal argued that the agency’s reluctance was a face-saving measure.

“The IAEA knows Iran would refuse their request, and that would demonstrate the inherent weakness of the effort to monitor Iran’s nuclear activities,” one Washington, DC-based analyst told The Algemeiner.

Doubts are again surfacing over whether President Donald Trump will certify Iranian compliance with the deal, as is required by Congress every 90 days. Since taking office this year, Trump has certified the deal twice – once in April and once, reportedly very reluctantly, in July – having described it on the campaign trail in 2016 as “the worst deal ever negotiated.”