Staff Reports
Axios says that Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid asked U.S. officials to rethink the nuclear deal on Thursday, saying that it has more concessions than the Biden administration was willing to accept.
Axios reported that Lapid told the White House that the deal on the table is better than what the U.S. agreed to in 2015, when the Obama administration signed the original Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran's ayatollah to stop Iran from developing its nuclear program further. Lapid also met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to repeat Israel's case for stopping the months-long effort to save the deal, and The Times of Israel said he will keep making this case with Western leaders.
“In the current situation, the time has come to walk away from the table. Anything else sends a message of weakness to Iran,” Lapid told Florida Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Middle East and North Africa subcommittee, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides on Thursday, Axios reported, citing a senior Israeli official.
Nothing here is true. We would never accept such terms. We also would not have left a deal that was working only to see Iran massively accelerate its nuclear program. https://t.co/MY6uJZzCGD
— National Security Council (@WHNSC) August 18, 2022
Victoria Coates, a former National Security Council adviser and member of the Vandenberg Coalition Board, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Israel wants to get out of the deal because it is "on the front lines of the threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran."
Axios said that Lapid also told Deutch and Nides that he was worried about an apparent clause that would put pressure on the International Atomic Energy Agency to stop its independent investigation into why Iran had unjustified nuclear materials. Lapid said that Iran is not giving good answers to the IAEA's questions.
He said, "This should raise a red flag for the international community."
Axios quotes Lapid as saying, “Now is the time to sit and talk about what to do going forward in order to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
Even though the European Union said its proposal from early August was a "final text," Iran replied on Monday, just before the EU's deadline, by listing a number of problems that it said still needed to be worked out with the U.S.
A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council told Axios on Thursday reports “that we have accepted or are considering new concessions to Iran as part of reentering the 2015 nuclear deal are categorically false,”
Reports say that Iran's biggest problem with the deal on the table is that it doesn't include economic guarantees and sanctions relief in case a future U.S. administration pulls out of the deal like Trump did in 2018.
Axios says that later, Lapid told lawmakers that Israel would not be bound by any nuclear deal signed by the U.S. and Iran. He also said that the U.S. knows Israel will do whatever it takes to stop Iran from funding terrorists in the area and from moving quickly toward making nuclear weapons.
Axios said that Israeli National Security Adviser Eyal Hulata wants to talk to White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan about the ongoing talks later in August.
The DCNF asked the State Department, the White House, and the Israeli and Iranian foreign ministries for comments, but they did not respond right away.
The preceding is a summary of an article that originally appeared on DAILY CALLER.
