Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Iran wants a second Holocaust and to "destroy another six million plus Jews", after Ayatollah Khamenei said the Jewish state was "cancerous".

In an outspoken attack on the Iranian leader, PM Netanyahu said: “This is amazing at the beginning of the 21^st century that someone talks about destroying Israel.

“It means destroying another six million plus Jews.”

The Iranian leader had described Israel as a  “malignant cancerous tumor” in a tweet on Sunday and declared that any country firing a missile at Iran “will be hit by 10".

But in an attempt to hit back with humour, the Israeli Embassy in Washington responded by tweeting a GIF from the movie Mean Girls, featuring the words “Why are you so obsessed with me?”

Mr Netanyahu arrived in Berlin on Monday, aiming to win Germany around to supporting President Trump’s lead and tearing up the 2015 nuclear deal.

He also raised the spectre of a new wave of Muslim refugees fleeing to Europe if Iran were allowed to expand its control in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.

“Iran which is Shia, wants to conduct a military campaign in Syria which is largely Sunni,” he said. “This will inflame religious war and the consequences would be many, many refugees.”

Mr Netanyahu arrives in the UK on Wednesday for a meeting with Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson.

The Israeli PM has approved the release of a cache of documents, seized by Mossad, which shows evidence that Iran continued to pursue a nuclear weapons programme, despite claiming it would not when the 2015 deal was signed.

The JC revealed on Monday that Britain had looked “more closely than some”  at the Israeli evidence.