The Israeli military is reportedly preparing to take out Iranian nuclear weapons facilities as talks between the Biden administration and Tehran come to an impasse. The Israeli media reported that Jerusalem has allocated $1.5 billion for a strike on Iran’s rogue nuclear sites.
The amount will be used to acquire “various types of aircraft, intelligence-gathering drones and unique armaments needed for such an attack, which would have to target heavily fortified underground sites,” the Times of Israel reported on Tuesday. A bulk of this equipment will be purchased from the U.S., the media reports suggest.
The Israeli government is worried that Tehran uses delay tactics to produce enough uranium to build a bomb. Iran has blocked the United Nation’s inspectors from accessing its critical uranium enrichment-related facility in recent weeks.
With Tehran rushing towards a nuclear bomb, Israel may be forced to act militarily. On Thursday, Israeli Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman warned that “a confrontation with Iran is only a matter of time, and not a lot of time.”
The Times of Israel reported Jerusalem’s counter-measures to prevent Iran from going nuclear:
Israel has approved a budget of some 5 billion shekels ($1.5 billion) to be used to prepare the military for a potential strike against Iran’s nuclear program, Channel 12 reported Monday.The NIS 5 billion budget is made up of NIS 3 billion from the previous budget and an additional NIS 2 billion from the next budget slated to be approved by the government in November.It includes funds for various types of aircraft, intelligence-gathering drones and unique armaments needed for such an attack, which would have to target heavily fortified underground sites, the unsourced report said.The report comes days after the US Air Force announced that it had carried out a successful test of its new “bunker buster,” the GBU-72 Advanced 5K Penetrator.The 5,000-pound bomb could be used as a tool to strike Iranian nuclear sites. Crucially, the GBU-72 is designed to be carried by a fighter jet or a heavy bomber. Israel does not have bombers capable of carrying the massive bunker busters in the current US arsenal.
The nuclear negotiations between the Biden White House and the Iranian regime have been put on hold amid a change of guard in Tehran. Following a sham election in June, hardliner Hassan Rouhani has been replaced by Ebrahim Raisi as the country’s president. Raisi, a protege of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, has been accused of crimes against humanity for his role in the mass-execution of thousands of Iranian dissidents in the early 1980s.
Instead of returning to the nuclear talks with the Biden administration, the Mullah regime uses delaying tactics as it ramps up its nuclear weapons program. President Joe Biden has eased sanctions pressure on Iran, but his policy of appeasement has failed to stop Iranians from pursuing a nuclear arsenal.
“The nuclear talks have been stalled since the election of hardline cleric Ebrahim Raisi to the Iranian presidency in June. Iran has repeated that it was ready to resume talks “soon” but has failed to commit to a date, leaving observers increasingly pessimistic,” The Politico noted on Sunday.
Israel will be Iran’s primary target if the Shia-Islamic regime gets its hands on a nuclear weapon. The Iranian Supreme Leader and top regime henchmen have repeatedly threatened to annihilate the Jewish State.
“Iran is becoming a nuclear threshold country,” Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week. “The Iranians are clearly dragging their heels, trying to cheat the world to continue to enrich uranium, to develop their ballistic missile program.”
Israeli foreign minister’s claims have been substantiated by the U.N. nuclear watchdog, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). “Iran has accelerated its enrichment of uranium to near weapons-grade,” Reuters reported in August, citing the IAEA.
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