Tehran slams Berlin’s ‘hypocrisy’ over Israeli nukes

In a statement on Friday, Nasser Kana’ani reacted to remarks made by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a joint press conference on Thursday with visiting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“It is strange that German officials introduce Iran’s peaceful nuclear program, which is under the most strict supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, as a threat but say no word about the extensive nuclear arsenal of the fake, occupier, and the anti-human Zionist regime which threatens the region and the world,” said the spokesman.

Scholz repeated the Western countries’ claims that Iran was trying to develop nuclear weapons and said that Tehran should not be allowed to have nukes. He also said Germany gives priority to diplomacy for resolving the issue while also claiming that Iran was a “real threat”.

“Independent countries and the world’s public opinion are fed up with such double standards and behaviors and are gradually becoming more confident in their conclusion about how far the claims and allegations of some Western governments against the Islamic Republic of Iran are hypocritical and invalid,” Kana’ani added.

Iran showed to the world the peaceful nature of its nuclear program by signing the JCPOA with six world states — namely the US, Germany, France, Britain, Russia and China — in 2015. However, Washington’s unilateral withdrawal in May 2018 and its subsequent re-imposition of sanctions against Tehran left the future of the deal in limbo. Meanwhile, other signatories to the deal, including Germany, failed to safeguard Iran’s interests under the deal.

Negotiations between the parties to restore the deal kicked off in Vienna in April 2021 in a bid to salvage the JCPOA. The discussions, however, have been at a standstill since August 2022 due to Washington’s refusal to remove the sanctions and offer guarantees that it will not exit the agreement again.

The West’s hype over Iran’s nuclear program comes as the Israeli regime is the sole possessor of nukes in the Middle East. Israel, which pursues a policy of deliberate ambiguity about its nuclear weapons, is estimated to possess 200 to 400 nuclear warheads in its arsenal.

Despite Iran, Israel has not signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and continues its unsupervised nuclear activities with the support of the United States and European countries.