Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has warned US President Donald Trump that the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s motto was: “fight to the last American soldier.”
Zarif’s comments come as an attempt to influence the American public after Israel has accused the Iranians of developing nuclear weapons in a secret site with military dimensions.
In a tweet on Tuesday, Zarif tagged US President Donald Trump, saying, “Did you know that Netanyahu was also instrumental in pushing the US into the Afghanistan quagmire? The same one that you now cannot get out of?”
“His (Netanyahu) motto since 1986: Fight to the last American soldier,” the top Iranian diplomat added.
More so, Zarif accused Netanyahu of seeking a "pretext for war" after him claiming that Iran had destroyed a secret site for nuclear military activities after realizing it was exposed to Israel.
A few hours before Zarif’s tweet, Netanyahu said Tehran was working to develop nuclear weapons at a secret site in Abadeh, but that Tehran destroyed the facility after learning it had been exposed.
"In this site, Iran conducted experiments to develop nuclear weapons," Netanyahu said in broadcast remarks, showing an aerial picture of several small buildings, including their coordinates, that he said were taken at the Abadeh facility late in June 2019.
"When Iran realized that we uncovered the site, here's what they did," he said, showing a picture he said was from a month later in which the buildings no longer appeared. "They destroyed the site. They just wiped it out."
Zarif, for his part, published a video about Netanyahu in 2002 during a US Congress grilling in which he gave assurances that the invasion of Iraq would have positive results for the region.
A Reuters report on Monday revealed that samples taken by the UN nuclear watchdog at what Israel’s prime minister called a “secret atomic warehouse” in Tehran showed traces of uranium that Iran has yet to explain.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is investigating the particles’ origin and has asked Iran to explain the traces. But Tehran has not done so, according to the diplomats, stoking tensions between Washington and Tehran.
US sanctions have slashed Iranian oil sales and Iran has responded by breaching its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
