Israel will not be bound by a possible revival of the Iran nuclear agreement, because the country should be able to defend itself against a potential aggressor, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday in a speech at an official Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony.
"A deal with Iran that threatens us with annihilation will not obligate us", he claimed, commenting the ongoing talks in Vienna between the joint JCPOA commission and Iranian representatives.
According to Netanyahu, the nuclear agreement in its original form "is worthless".
"I say to our closest friends too: 'A deal with Iran that threatens us with annihilation will not obligate us'. Only one thing will obligate us: to prevent those who wish to destroy us from carrying out their plans", the prime minister said.
The US recently expressed its intention to reconstruct the nuclear agreement, abandoned by Washington in 2018. The US has demanded that Tehran reverse some steps taken since then to improve its nuclear programme, but the Islamic Republic noted that the US should first remove all sanctions, reimposed after the nation's withdrawal from the pact.
Tel Aviv has been opposed to the JCPOA from the very beginning, and after the possibility of its resumption emerged, claimed that the "old format" could help Iran create "nucleal arsenal" and urged for broader restrictions for Iran.
According to earlier reports, Israel is seeking "an improved and long-term nuclear deal" that would include articles on Tehran's ballistic missile programme and its activity in the Middle East, sometimes defined by Tel Aviv as terrorism-related. Meanwhile, Iran has constantly denied allegations that it is seeking to obtain nuclear weapons.
During the aforementioned remembrance ceremony, Netanyahu also slammed the International Criminal Court's "outrageous" ruling to launch an investigation into potential Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians, saying the Jewish people "have every right to defend themselves from their enemies".
On 8 April, countries across the globe mark Holocaust Remembrance Day to honour the memory of 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust, and also commemorate the Jewish resistance movement of those times.
