Israeli Defense Ministry: Iran is close to creating a nuclear bomb

According to Israeli intelligence, Iran will soon accumulate a sufficient amount of materials and technical capabilities for the production of nuclear weapons.

"According to Gantz's assessment, Iran had two to three months before it has the materials and capabilities to produce one nuclear bomb", - RIA Novosti quoted Gantz as saying in an interview with Foreign Policy.

Gantz fears that as soon as Iran joins the number of nuclear powers, a new round of the arms race may begin in the region, but now with a nuclear warhead. The Israeli Defense Ministry expressed concern that the recent withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan could also have a negative impact on political stability in the region. Over the past 20 years, they have served as a kind of "deterrent", but with their departure, Iran and its supporters may become bolder and begin to act more confidently.

For several years now, Iran's nuclear development has caused serious concern in the world.

In 2015, the "5 + 1" group: Great Britain, Germany, China, Russia, USA, France, as well as Iran, which joined them, concluded a "nuclear deal". This political agreement between Iran and a group of countries belonging to the UN Security Council, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), assumed the group's agreement to develop Iran's peaceful nuclear program without the right to conduct military research to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

However, already in 2018, US President Donald Trump, against the backdrop of a scandal about Iran's accumulation of nuclear potential, announced the US withdrawal from the agreement and announced additional sanctions against Iran. In response, Iran announced the suspension of the implementation of two points of the deal and began to increase the volume of its own nuclear research and work on uranium enrichment.

Israel sees a great threat in the creation of an Iranian nuclear bomb , especially after the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called for the destruction of Israel, saying that the "barbaric" Israeli state "can no longer be helped, you can only destroy it." He called his plan "9 key questions about the elimination of Israel". The United States conducted an analysis of the situation and assessed the outcome of a potential war between Tel Aviv and Tehran. Military Watch magazine experts, for example, believe that weapons of mass destruction will not be used.

Meanwhile, the situation in the region is getting worse. For example, on June 23, the Iranian Mehr agency reported that the country's security services managed to prevent an “act of sabotage” against one of the facilities of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. This happened in the city of Qerej in the Alborz ostan in northwestern Iran, near Tehran. The Times of Israel insists that the company suffered damage, although no details are provided. It is noted that the attack on the Iranian nuclear facility was carried out using several small drones.

Iranian authorities previously claimed that the facility in Qerj was used for civilian purposes, but since 2007 it has been under UN, US and EU sanctions for its relationship to Iran's nuclear and missile programs. The American newspaper The New York Times, citing sources, reported that the attacked facility of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran is one of the centers for the production of the most modern centrifuges for uranium enrichment. American intelligence called it one of the possible targets for strikes by Israel, which in early 2020 coordinated its plans with then US President Donald Trump and his administration. Also among the targets were the Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was subsequently killed in November 2020, and the enterprise in Natanz, where the sabotage took place in April 2021. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed by a weapon that was controlled via satellite.

An intelligence source indicated that the Donald Trump administration supported Israel's plans. Recently, the former head of Israel's Mossad intelligence service, Yossi Cohen, hinted at the organization's involvement in the death of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and the Natanz incident. “We say very clearly to Iran: we will not allow you to get nuclear weapons. What do you not understand?", - he noted.