29 SEPT, 2018 11:00 Hrs GMT | UNITED NATIONS | NEW YORK, USA
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran’s foreign minister denounced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s allegations against Tehran at the U.N. General Assembly as an “obscene charge,” the state-run IRNA news agency reported Friday.
The response came after Netanyahu on Thursday claimed at the General Assembly that Iran has a “secret atomic warehouse” on Tehran’s outskirts and challenged U.N. inspectors to examine it.
It was unclear whether Netanyahu’s announcement sheds new light on what U.N. inspectors already know, or whether it was intended to prove that Iran has been violating the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with world powers that followed years of Western sanctions over the country’s contested atomic program.
According to IRNA, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called Netanyahu a “liar who would not stop lying.”
The 2015 nuclear deal saw Iran drastically limit its enrichment of uranium — a possible pathway to atomic-grade weapons — in exchange for the lifting of crushing economic sanctions. Iran long has denied seeking nuclear weapons and claimed its program is for peaceful purposes only.
The spokesman of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Bahram Ghasemi, said Netanyahu’s accusation was “not worth talking about.”
“These farcical claims and the show by the prime minister of the occupying regime (Israel) were not unexpected,” Ghasemi added.
Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, mocked Netanyahu, saying the Israeli leader must have been badly advised by some people.
Netanyahu made a similarly splashy accusation in May, saying Israeli agents spirited away a “half ton” of documents regarding Iran’s nuclear program from a facility in Tehran’s Shourabad neighborhood.
Separately, Netanyahu in his speech before the General Assembly also held up an image of what he said are rocket factories run by the Iran-backed Hezbollah group, hidden in civilian areas of Beirut.
In response, Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil tweeted that Israel was “fabricating pretexts” to launch an attack on Lebanon “from the podium of international legitimacy.”