Israel to world: Adopt hard line against Iran on nukes

Tel Aviv: Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Sunday urged world powers to take a hard line against Iran in negotiations aimed at reviving an international nuclear deal, as his top defense and intelligence officials headed to Washington to discuss the flailing talks.

Israel has been watching with concern as world powers sit down with Iran in Vienna in hopes of restoring the tattered 2015 deal. Iran last week struck its own hard line as talks resumed in Vienna, suggesting everything discussed in previous rounds of diplomacy could be renegotiated. Continued Iranian advances in its atomic program have further raised the stakes in talks that are crucial to cooling years of tensions in the wider Mideast.

The original deal, spearheaded by then-President Barack Obama, gave Iran much-needed relief from crippling economic sanctions in exchange for curbs on its nuclear activities. But then-President Donald Trump, with strong encouragement from Israel, withdrew from the deal in 2018, causing it to unravel. Israel has long opposed the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, known as the JCPOA, saying it didn’t go far enough to halt the country’s nuclear program and doesn’t address what it sees as hostile Iranian military activity across the region.