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Israel will “act alone” to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear-threshold state “if necessary,” Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said as negotiations between Tehran and world powers resumed in Vienna.
Tweeting that Israel “would prefer international cooperation” but must protect its security, he stated that Jerusalem isn’t opposed to the reaching of a deal per se; only one that has “no possibility of genuine oversight on the nuclear program, Iranian money or the Iranian terrorist network.”
Speaking at the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Lapid called preventing Tehran from developing nuclear weapons the “main challenge” Israel faces. “In recent months, we’ve been in an intensive dialogue with all the countries involved in these negotiations,” he said, adding: “Mainly with the US, naturally, but not only them. We’ve told everyone clearly that Israel will not allow Iran to become a nuclear threshold state.… We will defend our security by ourselves.”
The seventh round of talks, the first under Iran’s new hardline President Ebrahim Raisi, ended 10 days ago after adding some new Iranian demands to a working text. Western powers have said that progress was too slow and that negotiators had “weeks not months” left before the 2015 deal becomes meaningless.
For Iran, the key issue of the discussions in Vienna remains an end to sanctions.
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Israeli fighter jets fired a number of missiles at the port of the Syrian coastal city of Latakia early Tuesday morning, reportedly causing large explosions and fires. It was the second alleged Israeli strike in a month on the key facility.
SANA, Syria’s state media, quoted an unnamed military official as saying that several missiles struck the container area in the port. According to the report, the strikes caused “massive material damage.”
Videos posted to social media showed huge explosions, some of them apparently caused by the detonation of Iranian munitions.
Moment of the Israeli strikes on Latakia port by Sham FM. Looks like weapon/ammunition shipment was targeted. pic.twitter.com/PZD844to6H
— TheCrimsonWorm (@PrtyOfNone) December 28, 2021
For years, Israel avoided conducting strikes against the Latakia port due to the large presence of Russian forces nearby; this, despite Iran allegedly using the terminal to transport advanced arms to its proxies in the region, foremost the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terror group.
Before this month, the last time that Israel had reportedly conducted a strike on a target in Latakia — though not on the port — was in 2018, during which a Russian spy plane was accidentally shot down by Syrian air defenses. The incident set off a diplomatic crisis between Jerusalem and Moscow.
Israel has acknowledged that it targets the bases of Iranian forces and Iran-allied terror groups such as Hezbollah, particularly along the Golan border, that have fighters deployed in southern Syria. The Jewish state has also confirmed that it has attacked weapons shipments believed to be bound for these groups.
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Refusing to rule out a possible nationwide lockdown, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned Israelis on Tuesday that their country was about to see an unprecedented “storm of coronavirus infections, on a scale that we have not seen in Israel before.”
Preliminary numbers presented Tuesday morning by the Health Ministry showed close to 3,000 new COVID-19 cases in the preceding 24-hour period, and a positivity rate of nearly 3.5 percent.
“My goal from the beginning of the pandemic was to avoid closures as much as possible,” Israel’s premier stated. However, Bennett added that “the Omicron [variant] is different from everything we knew…. It is very contagious. It is breaking world records in almost all places.”
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Only about one in four antisemitic posts were removed from various social media platforms and other popular online sites in 2021, a new report released by an Israeli watchdog group revealed. According to Fighting Online Antisemitism (FOA), Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Telegram, YouTube, Facebook and VK combined received 3,922 reports of antisemitic content but took down only 1,004 such posts.
The report found that Russian social media network VK contains the most virulent anti-Jewish hate speech. Some 57.9 percent of the offensive posts were in English, 13.8 percent in Russian, 13.1 percent in Arabic, 9.8 percent in Spanish, 2.4 percent in French, and an additional 3 percent in other languages.
FOA noted that there are differences between each of the social media platforms, which affects how they can be monitored – a process that is mostly performed manually.
“The policy of removing [offensive] content is inconsistent and it varies between the social media platforms and their response time is grossly lacking,” FOA head Tomer Aldubi explained.
Recommended Reading
- Israel Fast Approaching Moment of Truth With Iran (Vice Adm. (ret.) Eliezer Marom, Israel Hayom)
- Social Media Stars to Be Trained Against Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism by Foreign Ministry (The Jewish Voice)
- The Ascent of the Crybully in Campus Anti-Israel Activism (Richard L. Cravatts, Jewish News Syndicate)
- Ali Express Says It Will Not Serve Palestinians Beginning in 2022 (Jerusalem Post)
- Israeli Researchers to Investigate Black Holes With Hubble Telescope (NoCamels)
