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Israeli FM Accuses ‘Octopus’ Khamenei of Smuggling Weapons into West Bank via Jordan

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz (AFP)
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz (AFP)
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Israeli FM Accuses ‘Octopus’ Khamenei of Smuggling Weapons into West Bank via Jordan

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz (AFP)
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz (AFP)

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz accused on Thursday Iran of attempting to establish an “eastern terror front” against Israel via Jordan, the Times of Israel reported.

Katz — who has faced some criticism for his style of online diplomatic attacks — published an AI-generated image showing Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei as an octopus with many tentacles.

The foreign minister said the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is smuggling weapons from Syria into Jordan, “attempting to destabilize the regime and turn the Israel-Jordan border from a peaceful one into a volatile front.”

The weapons are then brought into the West Bank, he added, “where an Iranian-Hamas terror infrastructure is being established.”

Katz called for a security fence to be built “quickly” along the Israel-Jordan border, something that has been promised for more than a decade by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but has been dismissed by security officials as a pipe dream.

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IAEA: Iran's Uranium Enrichment Rolls On

FILE - The flag of the International Atomic Energy Agency flies in front of its headquarters during an IAEA Board of Governors meeting in Vienna, Austria, on Feb. 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Heinz-Peter Bader, File)
FILE - The flag of the International Atomic Energy Agency flies in front of its headquarters during an IAEA Board of Governors meeting in Vienna, Austria, on Feb. 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Heinz-Peter Bader, File)
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IAEA: Iran's Uranium Enrichment Rolls On

FILE - The flag of the International Atomic Energy Agency flies in front of its headquarters during an IAEA Board of Governors meeting in Vienna, Austria, on Feb. 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Heinz-Peter Bader, File)
FILE - The flag of the International Atomic Energy Agency flies in front of its headquarters during an IAEA Board of Governors meeting in Vienna, Austria, on Feb. 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Heinz-Peter Bader, File)

Iran's production of highly enriched uranium continues and it has not improved cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog despite a resolution demanding this at the agency's last board meeting, watchdog reports seen by Reuters showed on Thursday.

Despite the resolution passed at the last quarterly meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation Board of Governors in June, nuclear diplomacy has largely been on hold with the election last month of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and the US presidential election due in November.
"The (IAEA) Director General (Rafael Grossi) expresses the hope that his initial exchange with President Pezeshkian will be followed by an early visit to Iran and the establishment of a fluid, constructive dialogue that swiftly leads to concrete results," said one of the two confidential, quarterly IAEA reports sent to member states on Thursday.

There has been no progress in the past quarter on several long-standing issues that have soured relations between the IAEA and Tehran, including Iran's barring of IAEA inspectors specialized in enrichment and Iran's failure to explain uranium traces at undeclared sites, the reports showed.

At the same time, Iran has added cascades, or clusters, of centrifuges, machines that refine uranium, at its main enrichment sites in Natanz and Fordow.
It has installed eight more cascades of advanced IR-6 centrifuges at Fordow, a site dug into a mountain, bringing the total there to 10, although the new ones had not yet been brought online, meaning they are not yet enriching uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas, one report showed. Iran's stock of uranium in UF6 form enriched to up to 60% purity, close to the roughly 90% of weapons grade, grew by an estimated 22.6 kg to 164.7 kg, one of the reports said.
According to an IAEA yardstick, that is 2 kg short of being enough, in theory, if enriched further, for four nuclear bombs. By the same measure Iran now has enough uranium enriched to up to 20% purity, if enriched further, for six bombs.