US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meeting in New York during the 72nd UN General Assembly. Photo: GPO

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday lauded US President Donald Trump’s disavowal of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, following the president’s decertification announcement on Friday. Trump also threatened to quit the deal entirely, should it not be amended to prevent Iran from further nuclear weapons research and ballistic missile development.

Opening Sunday morning’s meeting of the Israeli cabinet, Netanyahu commended Trump for his “important decision.”

Netanyahu asserted that any examination of the deal made it clear that “if nothing changes, Iran will have an arsenal of nuclear weapons within a few years.”

“This agreement does not block this,” the Israeli leader said. “It creates a sure path to the production of an enrichment system that could quickly bring Iran to dozens of atomic bombs and even more.”

Trump’s decision creates “an opportunity to fix the nuclear agreement and stop Iran’s increasing aggression in our region,” Netanyahu continued.

“I believe that any responsible government, and whoever seeks to promote peace and security in the world, needs to take advantage of the opportunity that President Trump’s decision has created in order to improve the agreement or abrogate it and, of course, stop Iran’s aggression,” he said.

Netanyahu also expressed strong support for Trump’s decision to sanction Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization. On Friday, the president described Iran’s most powerful military institution as “the Iranian supreme leader’s corrupt personal terror force and militia.” Trump said that the shift in US policy toward Iran introduced by his administration “begins with a long overdue step of imposing tough sanctions on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

Netanyahu said it was “self-evident that the President’s decision to impose sanctions on the Revolutionary Guards needs to be supported.”

“The Revolutionary Guards are Iran’s main arm in spreading terror around the world and, of course, in spreading its aggression throughout the Middle East,” Netanyahu said.