Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu congratulated President Donald Trump after Trump announced on Friday that he will not certify Iran's compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal.
"I congratulate President Trump for his courageous decision today. He boldly confronted Iran's terrorist regime," said Netanyahu in a video statement.
Netanyahu, who was a prominent opponent of the deal when it was signed in 2015, reiterated that the deal paves the way for Iran to get a nuclear weapon. "If the Iran deal is left unchanged, one thing is absolutely certain- in a few years' time, the world's foremost terrorist regime will have an arsenal of nuclear weapons and that's a tremendous danger for our collective future," he said.
"President Trump has just created an opportunity to fix this bad deal. To roll back Iran's aggression and to confront its criminal support of terrorism. That's why Israel embraces this opportunity. And that's why every responsible government, and any person concerned with the peace and security of the world, should do so as well," he added.
Netanyahu had been an avowed opponent of the nuclear deal when it was signed in 2015, telling the United States Congress that "the deal will not prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It would all but guarantee that Iran gets those weapons, lots of them".
President Trump officially announced on Friday that he was decertifying Iran's compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal. While Trump said that the US would not scrap the Iran deal for now, he vowed that he could do so "at any time," and announced that he would give Congress 60 days to decide the fate of the nuclear agreement.
Trump also verbally denounced Iran as a "fanatical regime" whose "aggression continues to this day", pointing out that "the regime’s two favorite chants are ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel".
Trump also slammed the 2015 Iran deal for what he called its lack of enforcement and for permitting Iran to make the move for a nuclear weapon after ten years, asking "What is the purpose of a deal that only, at best, delays Iran?"
"As I have said many times, the Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into,” he said, later accusing Iran of “not living up to the spirit of the deal”.
"Iran will never, ever, get a nuclear weapon," Trump concluded.
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)