Bibi bids to buttress ‘hardline’ on Tehran
Faster centrifuges set
LONDON, Sept 5, (Agencies): Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged world powers on Thursday not to open a dialogue with Iran, after US President Donald Trump said he may meet his Iranian counterpart to resolve a crisis over Tehran’s nuclear project and sanctions against it.
“This is not the time to hold talks with Iran. This is the time to increase the pressure on Iran,” Netanyahu told reporters en route to London, where he was hosted by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and was later scheduled to confer with US Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Netanyahu’s comments marked rare public discord between the rightwing Israeli leader and Trump on the Iranian nuclear issue. Netanyahu had previously counselled France against its own outreach to Iran.
The Israeli leader, who is fighting for his political life in an election on Sept 17, regularly touts his influence with Western leaders, especially fellow rightwingers such as Trump and Johnson, as vital for Israeli security. His opponents say his closeness to rightwing figures abroad hurts Israel by making support for it a partisan issue in friendly countries.
Iran was poised Thursday to begin work on advanced centrifuges that will enrich uranium faster as the 2015 nuclear deal unravels further and a last-minute French proposal offering a $15-billion line of credit to compensate Iran for not being able to sell its crude oil abroad because of US sanctions looked increasingly unlikely.
Meanwhile, Iran released seven crew members from a detained Britishflagged oil tanker Stena Impero in a goodwill gesture and the mariners flew out of Iran, the ship’s owner said.
Though Iran has yet to say officially what exact steps it will take as a deadline it gave Europeans to salvage the deal is to expire on Friday. Centrifuges that speed enrichment further shorten the time Tehran would need to have enough material available to build a nuclear weapon – if it chose to do so.
Under the deal, which has steadily unraveled after President Trump’s unilateral withdrawal of the US from the accord last year, experts thought Iran would need about a year to reach that point.
Iran’s atomic energy agency was to make an announcement on Saturday detailing its next step, which President Hassan Rouhani described as highly significant, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency and other Iranian media. The details would be unveiled at a press conference in Tehran, the reports said.
The US has continued its effort to choke off Iran’s crude oil sales abroad, a crucial source of government revenue. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who continues a whirlwind global diplomatic tour, insists his country will do everything it can to keep those sales going, though he described US sanctions in an angry tweet Thursday as the equivalent of a “jail warden.”
“We will sell our oil, one way or the other,” Zarif told Russian broadcaster RT in a recently aired interview. “The United States will not be able to prevent that.”
Tensions between Iran and the US have been growing since Trump’s pullout from the nuclear deal, which saw Tehran agree to limit its uranium enrichment in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Trump subsequently re-imposed old sanctions on Iran and created new ones, going as far as targeting Iranian officials like Zarif and Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.
Also, mysterious oil tanker attacks struck near the Strait of Hormuz in recent weeks, attacks that the US blames on Iran. Tehran denies it was involved.
Iran also shot down a US military surveillance drone and seized oil tankers as America deployed nuclear-capable B-52 bombers, advanced fighter jets and more troops to the region.
The US has sought to seize an Iranian oil tanker, the Adrian Darya-1, now thought by analysts to be off the Syrian coast despite a pledge by Tehran that its cargo wasn’t bound there.
In his speech late Wednesday, Rouhani said Tehran would soon begin work on research and development of “all kinds” of centrifuges that enrich uranium by rapidly spinning uranium hexafluoride gas.
Iran has begun break limits of the deal, such as just creeping beyond its 3.67 percent-enrichment limit and its stockpile rules. Using advanced centrifuges speeds up enrichment and Iranian officials already have raised the idea of enriching to 20 percent – a small technical step from weaponsgrade levels of 90 percent.
Iran long has maintained its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and denies it seeks an atomic bomb. However, Western nations have pointed to previous Iranian research into a weapons program that UN experts say largely ended in 2003.
The European Union Thursday criticized the announcement by Iran to lift all limits on nuclear research and development which is seen as another step in reducing commitments to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
“These activities are inconsistent with the JCPOA,” an EU spokesperson for Foreign Affairs, Carlos Martin Ruiz de Gordejuela, told a news conference.
“We urge Iran to reverse these steps and to refrain from further measures that undermine the nuclear deal,” he added.
According to media reports, Rouhani has said that from Friday Iran would begin developing centrifuges to speed up the enrichment of uranium.