Israel is making a new push to block the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, also known as the Iran nuclear deal) from being restored, the AFP has reported, citing Prime Minister Yair Lapid and its own anonymous sources.
According to the latter, Mossad chief David Barnea will be paying Washington a visit to hold several closed-doors meetings with members of Congress. He will apparently be trying to convince them not to ratify the renewed deal in its present form.
Tel Aviv claims that the 2015 deal, to which Iran wants to adhere after the US returns to the agreement, would allow Tehran to arm its "proxies" and allegedly develop nuclear weapons. Israel insists that the deal must either be scrapped or modified to severely increase monitoring and impose limits on the Iranian ballistic missile program – something that Tehran has been flatly rejecting.
Prime Minister Lapid announced earlier today that he is waging a "diplomatic fight" against the JCPOA, despite allegations from his opponent, leader of the Likud Party Benjamin Netanyahu. Lapid said that his national security advisor and defense minister were holding meetings with US officials trying to prevent the deal's restoration.
"We are making a concerted effort to ensure the Americans and Europeans understand the dangers involved in this agreement," he said.
Netanyahu earlier accused the prime minister of "completely abandoning" the fight against the JCPOA restoration talks and missing the chance to kill them before progress is made.
However, Lapid snapped back, pointing out that the aggressive opposition that the former prime minister was promoting had already resulted in the US administration side-lining Tel Aviv and ejecting it from the process of making amendments to what later became the JCPOA in 2015. In 2015, Netanyahu delivered a fiery speech critical of Washington's plans to strike a deal with Iran that was not negotiated with the White House. Following it, relations between Israel and the Obama administration deteriorated considerably.
Israel continues to insist that the revived 2015 JCPOA will enable Iran to build nukes even though Tehran has repeatedly stated that it does not pursue them. The US, which unilaterally abandoned the agreement in May 2018, has been negotiating a way to restore it and return Tehran to compliance. The sides recently exchanged proposals on the draft agreement via the EU, the key mediator in the on-going talks, but the outcome of the exchange is yet to be made public.