A deal with Iran over its nuclear progamme is set to be signed in days - but Israeli government sources fear it will open the floodgates for billions of newly released petrodollars to fund terror.
The long months of negotiation to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA) abandoned by Donald Trump are expected to come an agreement very soon. US and European officials say the deal is likely to be concluded on Monday.
But an Israeli government source warned the JC: “They are much closer to a nuclear breakout now than they were in 2015. And billions are now going to flow straight to the terrorist militias.”
The talks in Vienna have continued despite the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which is also at the negotiating table. The agreement is set to re-impose restrictions designed to prevent Iran from being able to build an atomic bomb. In return, Tehran can sell oil and see international sanctions against a long list of Iranian firms and institutions lifted.
Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian said he was ready to sign the deal as soon he was sure that all his “red line” demands had been satisfied. EU official Josep Borrell, who is coordinating the talks, said he was confident most of Iran’s wishes had been met.
The original JCPoA was agreed under the Obama administration in 2015 but unilaterally repudiated by President Trump in 2018, who reimposed US sanctions. Although Britain, Russia and the EU remained wedded to the deal, Iran responded by accelerating its nuclear development programme, developing advanced centrifuges and starting to stockpile uranium enriched to 60 per cent.
Intelligence sources have warned that Iran may be just months away from a workable nuclear device.
Key Israeli figures today expressed dismay at the looming agreement. Yossi Kuperwasser, a former top military intelligence officer, now a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, told the JC: “We are going to pay a high price for this – it will allow Iran to expand its hegemony across the region. And yet another entity hostile to the West will be able to say, ‘We have won a confrontation with the Americans,’ allowing it to threaten everybody.
“This is more of a disaster than the original JCPoA deal, because they already know how to get to 60 per cent. They will use the money they will make from the lifting of sanctions to fund Islamic Jihad, Hizbollah and other terror proxies – these people are going to have a ball."
He said the timing of the deal was baffling, because the Iranian regime, thanks to the weight of sanctions, “is about to contend with severe challenges to its stability”. He said huge protests had been planned in Iranian cities for the middle of this month, “but now they have let them off the hook”. Meanwhile, recent sanctions against Russia were causing the oil price to rocket – “so Iran will make still more when it can sell its products again”.
Earlier this week, Naftali Bennett expressed deep “concern” at the prospect of a deal. After meeting German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the Israeli prime minister said: “The possibility of negotiating an agreement that will allow Iran to install centrifuges on a large scale within a few years is not acceptable to us. Israel will know how to defend itself and ensure its security and future.”
Iran has continued to sponsor terror over the past few years through its proxies such as Hizbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and militant groups in Iraq.
Senior Tory MP and former minister Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the Commons select committee on defence, has long said that any new nuclear agreement should also require a regional security agreement to curb Iranian aggression.
He told the JC: “These talks cannot be the endgame – we can’t just go home having made many concessions and allow attacks by Iranian proxies to continue.” It was also vital that the nuclear component of the deal should be strictly policed, he said, so that sanctions should only be lifted if Iran could demonstrate strict compliance.
Last month, a study by the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) think tank set out details of 186 separate terrorist attacks by Iran and its proxies against Britain and its allies since the JCPOA was agreed in 2015.
HJS executive director Alan Mendoza said today: “This is an extraordinary U-turn by the British government which just a year ago pledged that sanctions relief would be conditional on Iran ceasing to sponsor terrorism."
