Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations General Assembly. Photo: screenshot.

The Iranians are getting ever closer to developing nuclear weapons, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Jewish American leaders on Monday in Jerusalem.

“I drew a line at the UN last time I was there,” Netanyahu told leaders from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, referring to the diagram of a bomb he presented to the United Nations General Assembly last September, on which he drew a red line symbolizing the danger of the Iranian quest for nuclear capability, setting a rough deadline of summer 2013 as the date by which Iran could have enough highly enriched material to produce a nuclear bomb.

“They haven’t crossed that line, but what they’re doing is to shorten the time that it will take them to cross that line,” the prime minister said, according to Israel Hayom.

Netanyahu said the way Iran is shortening that time “is by putting in new, faster centrifuges that cut the time by one third.”

“This has to be stopped, for the interest of peace and security, for the interest of the entire world,” he said.

The Conference of Presidents is the central coordinating body for American Jewry, representing 52 national Jewish agencies from across the political and religious spectrums.

To stop Iran’s nuclear progress, according to Netanyahu, “you have to put greater pressure on them.”

“You have to upgrade the sanctions,” he said. “And they have to know that if the sanctions and diplomacy fails, they will face a credible military threat.”