TEHRAN (Iran News) The Israeli government approved the ceasefire agreement early on Saturday after meeting for more than six hours, Qatar’s Al Jazeera TV network cited a statement issued by Netanyahu’s office.

The media added that 24 ministers voted in favor of the deal while eight opposed it.

Earlier on Friday, the Israeli security cabinet voted in favor of the ceasefire deal.

Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, whose country hosted the ceasefire negotiations, has said that Hamas and Israel have agreed to halt the war in Gaza. He said the deal would go into effect on Sunday, January 19.

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According to Israeli media reports, Bennett is scheduled to address the 76th session of the UN General Assembly for the first time next Monday.
In the past 12 years, Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken ten times in the UN General Assembly on behalf of the Israeli regime, each time presenting often ridiculed propaganda shows, claiming that Iran would soon acquire a nuclear weapon.
For example, in his 2012 speech, he claimed that Iran would soon have such a weapon by presenting a drawing of an atomic bomb. In his 2020 speech, he also showed images that he claimed were satellite images of a Hezbollah arsenal in Lebanon.

According to western news media, on the eve of Naftali Bennett’s visit to New York, Mossad and Israeli military intelligence officials asked him if he intended to provide information about Hezbollah or Iran in a General Assembly speech. However, Bennett’s aides said they did not want to use “visual aids, poster boards, drawings, and the like.”

However, according to some Israeli media, like Netanyahu, much of Naftali Bennett’s speech would focus on Iran.

Although Naftali Bennett and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are both considered radical extremist politicians toward Iran, the Israeli media claim Bennett intends to steer Tel Aviv’s policies in a new direction.

Western countries, led by the United States and the Israeli regime, have accused Iran of pursuing military goals in its nuclear program in recent years. Iran has denied these allegations.

Iran emphasizes that as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, it has the right to acquire nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

In addition, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors have visited Iran’s nuclear facilities several times. However, they have never found any evidence that the country’s peaceful nuclear energy program deviates from military purposes.

In addition, in 2015, Iran reached an agreement (JCPOA) with P5 + 1 countries to resolve tensions over its nuclear program. Despite the International Atomic Energy Agency’s acknowledgment of Iran’s adherence to all of its obligations, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in May 2016.

On the other hand, the Israeli regime is the only possessor of nuclear weapons in the West Asian region. With U.S. support, it has kept its nuclear weapons program out of international control.

The new U.S. administration claims that it intends to return the U.S. to the JCPOA but has refused to fulfill its obligations in this regard.
The Israeli regime and Washington have put cooperation against Iran on their agenda in recent months. Reuters reported two months ago that Israel’s new cabinet intends to send a group of sanctions experts to Washington to discuss ways to implement better the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the sanctions regime against Iran.

The Western media clarified that this strategy is very different from “Benjamin Netanyahu” policy, the former Prime Minister of the Israeli regime, who did not intend to cooperate fully with the Biden establishment regarding the return of the United States to the JCPOA.

On July 3, Axios reported, quoting Israeli officials, that Tel Aviv intended to use diplomacy to influence the U.S. government’s approach regarding Iran’s nuclear program.

Although Naftali Bennett and his cabinet, like Netanyahu, oppose a nuclear deal with Iran, Axios writes that engagement with the United States on the issue is on Bennett’s agenda.

On September 22, Axios reported that the U.S. and the Israeli regime had held a secret meeting about JCPOA in recent days.

According to the report, the meeting was held in a secret video conference chaired by White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and head of the Israeli regime National Security Council Eyal Hulata. The meeting was to discuss an alternative U.S. plan if Iran does not return to the JCPOA talks.

A senior Israeli official told Axios that the United States intends to impose new sanctions on Iran if the Vienna talks on the UN Security Council do not resume.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made many attempts to overthrow JCPOA when he was in power, including urging former U.S. President Donald Trump to step down from the deal. He has repeatedly stressed that Trump, with his encouragement, left the JCPOA and pursued a “maximum pressure” policy against Iran.

Trump and Netanyahu hoped that maximum pressure could persuade Iran to come to the table to discuss a new agreement instead of JCPOA. This policy failed.

Trump stepped down on January 20 this year, failing to achieve his anti-Iranian goals. In addition, he has been widely criticized in the U.S. for not having a strategy for Iran, fomenting tensions with Iran, and advancing Iran’s nuclear program during his four years in the White House.

Joe Biden government officials have repeatedly acknowledged the failure of the “maximum pressure” policy, saying they intend to bring the United States back to JCPOA but have so far refused to take the necessary steps to return to the agreement.

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The Egyptian-brokered ceasefire between the Gaza Strip and the Israeli regime held into Saturday as mediators continued consultations with the Israeli and Palestinian sides to make sure that the war would not break out again.

Having failed to achieve its goals, Israel unilaterally announced a ceasefire with Gaza on Friday midnight after 12 days of heavy bombardment against Gaza. The Palestinians from all walks of life celebrated their victory while Israel and its newfound allies in the region remained silent. This silence is telling. Israel lost more than it achieved. Resistance groups in Gaza are still around and they became even more confident due to their shrewd management of the fighting with an enemy enjoying overwhelming military support from a number of Western governments.

Israel’s loss is not limited to damaged buildings and cars; its global standing also was severely damaged as hundreds of thousands of people around the world took to the streets to denounce Israel’s brute violence against civilians in Gaza. Furthermore, Israel’s much-vaunted myth of co-existence between Jews and the so-called Israeli Arabs was shattered when the Israeli police resorted to the use of lethal force to quash Arab protests inside Israel, prompting some of them to push back against the police. There were also clashes between Arabs and Jews in several mixed cities.

Observers say the last round of violence between Arabs and Jews in Israel has left them afraid of each other, with some of them refraining from leaving their homes even for medical treatment out of fear that they would be targeted by the other. Individuals from both sides began to apply for weapons licenses, and everyone exchanged accusations, amidst extremely tense situations.

The Israeli Ministry of Interior revealed that the number of Jewish gun license applicants doubled seven times over the past week, from 270 requests to 1926, noting that there are about 145,000 Jews who possess licensed weapons at present.

An Israeli security official has said the hike in demand for the weapon is dire, but it is based on an understandable logic, signaling that fear has prevailed over Israeli society. As a result of this tense atmosphere, fear and anxiety spread widely on both sides. Many Arab workers complained of receiving dismissal orders, and Arab university students refused to go to their universities, according to Asharq Al Awsat. Several hospital administrations revealed that Arab doctors and nurses were absent from work, and they explicitly said that they feared attacks, the newspaper said, adding that Arab students at a Beersheba university complained that right-wing activists attacked them for participating in a demonstration.

Before the 12-day Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip, there was a belief among some Israeli Arabs that without co-existence between Arabs and Jews inside Israel it is impossible to achieve peace between Israel and the Arab world because if Israel was to suppress its own Arab “citizens” it would fail to make the case that it can live in peace with Arab states.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to downplay this belief, believing that peace is possible with the Arab world while trampling on the rights of Palestinians. From this perspective, Netanyahu pressed ahead with his normalization deals with a number of Arab states such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

Last year in August, then U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he brokered a “historic deal” between the UAE and Israel to normalize their relations, the first such deal between Israel and an Arab country since 1994. The last time an Arab country signed a deal with Israel to normalize relations was on October 26, 1994, when Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel. Following in the footsteps of the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan also normalized relations with Israel.

These countries enumerated a variety of reasons to justify their controversial decision to normalize ties with Israel and mitigating Israeli aggression against the Palestinians was the prime one. For example, the Emiratis said their normalization with Israel would encourage Tel Aviv it to treat Palestinians well and make it more receptive to internationally recognized solutions to the decades-long Palestine-Israel conflict.

To back their arguments, the Emiratis largely pointed to the Israeli decision to suspend plans to annex large swaths of the West Bank in exchange for normalization with the UAE.

But the Israeli aggression showed that the Emirati reasoning was flawed. Israel can never be expected to behave normally or to respect the rights of the Palestinians without pressure. Netanyahu showed that the hype surrounding the normalization deals with Arab states was a ploy to hoodwink more Arab countries into accepting normalization without first addressing the Palestinian issue. But as the Israeli warplanes pummeled Gaza with rockets and missiles, this ploy went up in smoke. Now, the Arab world understands that Israel only understands the language of power and that it will never be willing to make peace with the Palestinians through diplomatic compliments.

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The 71-year-old Israeli prime minister is known for his thirst for power. He has run Israel into the grounds for 15 years, but mostly, he is known for his idiocy. From awfully wrong predictions, such as “Iran will have a nuclear bomb in five years from now” to losing the 33-day war to the Lebanese Hezbollah, along with losing the 22-day war to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The old fox is charged with bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. When you are Israel’s longest-serving prime minister you make stupid decisions. There is a long list of Netanyahu’s increasingly desperate attempts to maintain power. From accepting gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from wealthy friends such as Hollywood film producer Arnon Milchan and Australian billionaire James Packer to attempting to orchestrate favorable coverage in a major Israeli newspaper in return for restricting distribution of a free pro-Netanyahu tabloid.

His recent effort, however, was to get into a full-fledged war with the Palestinians just before celebrating their most important religious Eid, Eid al-Fitr, which falls on May 14. There is an Islamic saying by one of the Imams that says “Thank God who has made our enemies fools.” When you look at the recent developments in al-Quds, you realize that Bibi Netanyahu falls exactly under that saying.

On Sunday, Israel’s channel 7 announced that the Israeli security cabinet has passed a plan that allows the government to launch massive airstrikes on the Gaza Strip without having the need to attack the area on the ground.

Let’s recap for just a brief moment. How did it all begin?

It all started on May 6, when the Israeli Supreme Court decided a forced eviction of the Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. The Palestinians protested over the unfair ruling, as they were forced to leave their homes. Sheikh Jarrah have witnessed many tragic scenes over the past few days; and what makes it even more tragic is that it all happened in the holy month of Ramadan, when the Palestinians were fasting. Israeli forces stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, and dispersed the Palestinian worshippers elsewhere in East Jerusalem.

On May 9, the Israeli forces raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque by throwing tear gas and stun grenades into the mosque, as the defenseless Palestinians were busy worshipping. The Islamic Jihad, Hamas’ fellow resistance movement, warned the Israeli regime against further aggressive actions, stating that all Palestinian resistance groups align their actions with what is occurring in al-Quds. Therefore, on May 10, they fired 150 rockets into Israel from Gaza. Clearly surprised, the Israeli army said that they have only succeeded to intercept only one rocket.

The recent developments can be interpreted as one of Netanyahu’s desperate efforts to stay in power. Sami Abu Shehadeh, Palestinian Knesset member and leader of the Balad party, has said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu allowed for an “escalation” in a bid to remain in power, according to Al Jazeera.

“In order to survive this political crisis he finds himself in now, and in order for him not to lose control and not to lose his seat as prime minister … he is ready to do anything,” Shehadeh said.

“What is happening here is a clear political decision that Netanyahu is responsible for to keep power,” Shehadeh pointed out.

What Shehadeh raised is something we should carefully consider. He is referring to a possibility that Bibi announces an emergency situation. Having failed to form a coalition government, Reuven Rivlin, the Israeli president asked Netanyahu’s arch nemesis, Yair Lapid, to form a government. If Lapid fails to secure a majority in the 120-seat Knesset, Israel will witness its fifth election in two years, but that is only one of his failures in domestic politics.

He has failed to bridge the ideological differences in Israel due to various reasons.

First is the sabotage attack on the Natanz nuclear facility. It did not work, as Iran began producing enriched uranium with 60% purity, sending a loud and clear message that Israel should be scared of Iran, not vice versa. The act of sabotage at the Natanz nuclear site backfired horribly on Israel. It accelerated the process of negotiations, with all sides coming to a mutual understanding about the deal.

Second, the Biden administration has deep ideological differences with Netanyahu, despite Biden’s friendship with Bibi. On the issue of the Vienna negotiations, Israel has repeatedly stated that it opposes the idea of negotiations, let alone the revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). They have had various interviews, sent private messages through various channels, and so on, but the Biden foreign policy team is determined to revive the nuclear deal. Therefore, he played his last card.

Bibi had no chance. He had lost the gamble. Therefore, he put all his cards on the deck, starting a dangerous battle with the Jerusalemites in a crucial time of the year. Clearly, he doesn’t know that the timing of the battle has ignited a passion in the Palestinians to resist harder.

As the Leader of the Islamic Revolution rightly predicted in his speech on International Quds Day on May 7, “the downward spiral leading to the decline of the hostile Zionist regime has started and will not stop.”

It is just a matter of time.

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“I think Iran should take tough action. A harsh response cannot be hasty,” Fereydoun Abbasi Davani, who is also a professor of nuclear physics at Shahid Beheshti University, told the Tehran Times in an interview published on Friday.

“From now on, saboteurs and the individuals who contributed to the attack on the Natanz nuclear facility must be tracked down,” Abbasi Davani said.

The former director of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) also blamed the US and Britain over the incident, saying most of the intelligence-gathering in such cases is done by American and British intelligence services, while the Israeli regime is the one that carries out the sabotage operations.

The Natanz nuclear site was hit by an attack on April 11 which Iran called “nuclear terrorism” and a “war crime”. The attack targeted the electricity distribution network of the Natanz enrichment facility and caused a blackout.

Abbasi Davani, who served as the AEOI chief from February 2011 to August 2013, further asserted that Iran reserves the right to retaliate and deliver even more destructive blows to the enemy.

In recent days, Israel has been gripped by consecutive incidents, including a missile landing near its secretive nuclear facility in Dimona and a powerful explosion rocking its Tomer factory manufacturing advanced weapons.

The incidents have been broadly speculated to be the inevitable consequences of the Israeli regime’s provocative and destructive moves.

Iranian officials also believe that Israel, through the Natanz sabotage act, intended to kill the prospects of a US return to the Iran nuclear deal, which would include the lifting of the United States’ illegal sanctions on Tehran. The deal, also called the JCPOA, was ditched by former US President Donald Trump in 2018.

Israeli officials expected to object to US return to JCPOA in DC visit

According to Israeli officials, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has instructed a delegation traveling to Washington, DC, to stress their objection to the US return to the JCPOA and to refuse to discuss its contents.

According to a report published by Axios news website, Netanyahu convened a meeting on Thursday with the Israeli delegation to discuss the policies that will be presented in Washington.

The decision at the end of the meeting was to stress that a return to the deal would put Israel in danger, and to otherwise decline to discuss the ongoing talks in Vienna, an Israeli official said.

During the meeting, Netanyahu also stressed that Israel is not a party to the JCPOA and is therefore not bound by it in any way, adding that Israel will maintain its freedom of operation against Iran in the region.

Meanwhile, Barbara Slavin, an American foreign policy expert, has said the Israeli prime minister acts for domestic motives when he conducts acts of sabotage such as the one at the Natanz nuclear site.

“Bibi Netanyahu also has domestic political problems and he thinks these kinds of actions make him look tough,” Slavin told the Tehran Times in an interview published on Friday.

She added that given the Israeli regime’s Stuxnet cyber-attack which targeted the Iranian nuclear energy program, many political figures in Iran believe that Israel and the US are accomplices in targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities.

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The day when U.S. President Donald Trump announced withdrawal of the U.S. from of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and the White House put on a righteous face regarding his decision and issued a perfectionist statement, the reactions in Iran were different.

IRAN NEWS POLITICAL DESK

Some expressed their hatred regarding Trump and the U.S. Administration, and some other called this decision a totally ineffective and useless one. This action was praised by the U.S. conservatives who considered the JCPOA as a weak agreement. Other American political personalities like former President Barack Obama and his vice-president Joe Biden criticized Trump’s decision while European countries including UK, France and Germany which were the signatories of the JCPOA deplored this action of President Trump. By the way, all polls conducted showed that most of American people disagreed President Trump’s decision and preferred at least some part of the deal to be preserved.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action which is unofficially known as Iran nuclear deal or Iran deal was an international agreement on Iran’s nuclear program which was inked in July 2015 between Iran, P5+1 (five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – China, France, Russia, UK and the U.S. – plus Germany) and EU, and Iran’s pullout of it was not considered as a legal action.

President Trump had repeatedly spoken about the modification of the JCPOA until May 12, 2018 and reiterated that if other signatories of the JCPOA (France, UK, Russia, China and Germany) did not take action for modifying the deal based on the U.S. policy (of course supporting Israel), the U.S. would reimpose the nuclear sanctions against Iran. He used to say that the U.S. would only stay in the JCPOA if it was modified and four new conditions to be included in it.

Trump during a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron officially announced, “Nobody knows what will be my decisions for May 12 (the deadline for Iran’s commitment to the JCPOA).” Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his equivocal remarks said that he presumed strongly that the U.S. would soon pull out of the nuclear deal. He considered the U.S. being on the verge of leaving the JCPOA. Former counselor to the U.S. Department of State Wendy Sherman expressed her concern over isolation of the U.S. after its pullout of the nuclear deal. She even in an article published in the New York Times emphasized, “The U.S. exit from the nuclear deal will provide Iran with this opportunity for uranium enrichment, and as long as the U.S. is not committed to its deal obligations, Iran will not remain committed to its obligations, either.”

She tried to make her friends taking office in the White House believe if the U.S. was not a trustable ally, its European allies would not involve it in other international equations. Most of the critics of the White House policies also believed that the U.S. exit from the JCPOA would harm seriously the relation between the U.S. and its European allies. They believed that this action, besides being a threat against the U.S. national security interests, would decrease the international capability for monitoring Iran’s nuclear activities and it would be crystal clear that the U.S. exit of the JCPOA would dishearten hostile countries to the U.S. (like North Korea which is considered a dangerous nuclear threat to the U.S.) from negotiation with this country and this exit would be more loss to the U.S. and instead in favor of Iran.

Now 22 months after the U.S. pullout of the deal, Trump is on the slope of falling from the power and legally handing over the White House to the Democrat Party representative, and he should accept this point that whatever his non-partisan rivals had criticized have come true, and if there was not President Hassan Rouhani government’s tiptoeing-around in Iran regarding the reactions to the U.S. action, today Iran could have stood three hundred steps ahead of its current position.

Trump should believe this fact that his deadly sanctions despite inefficiency of Iran government have not succeeded so much. He should believe that all of his actions in the past might turn into the encounter of him versus nothing, and the U.S. legal president-elect Joe Biden, with winning some 51 percent of Americans’ votes in the 2020 presidential election, would indisputably return to the same JCPOA in order to prove the world that the U.S. is not a uncivilized country where a government signs a deal and the next government retreats its signature under any pretext.

Now Biden should think of how he does convince Iran for the U.S. return to the JCPOA and what concessions he should give Iran or how he compensates Iranian people with the damages they have suffered in these years.

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IRAN NEWS POLITICAL DESK

TEHRAN – Foreign Ministry of the Islamic Republic of Iran has strongly condemned the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel, describing it as a stab in the back of Muslim world.

In a statement released on Friday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry strongly denounced the establishment of diplomatic relations between the UAE and the Zionist regime, describing it as a strategic stupid move made by Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv which would undoubtedly strengthen the axis of resistance in the region.

The statement underlined that the oppressed people of Palestine and all free nations in the world will never forgive the normalization of ties with the usurping and criminal regime of Israel and aiding and abetting the regime’s crimes.

“Undoubtedly, the blood shed unjustly during seven decades of resistance for the liberation of the holy Palestinian territory and the first qibla of Muslims will haunt those betraying the cause of Palestine sooner or later,” it added.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran considers Abu Dhabi’s shameful move to normalize relations with the fake, illegitimate and anti-humane Zionist regime as a dangerous measure, warns against any interference by the Zionist regime in the Persian Gulf region’s equations, and declares that the Emirati government and the other governments siding with it must accept responsibility for all the consequences of this move,” the statement noted.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry has also expressed confidence that history will show how the strategic mistake made by the Zionist regime and the move by the UAE to unfairly stab the Palestinian people and the whole Muslims in the back would backfire, strengthen the axis of resistance, and maximize unity and solidarity against the Zionist regime and the regional reactionaries.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has finally advised the rulers, who are inside glass palaces and claw at the faces of Palestinians and other oppressed people of the region like Yemenis, to wake up and not go the wrong way in realizing their friends and foes.

The United Arab Emirates and Israel have reached a deal that will lead to a full normalization of diplomatic relations.

The agreement came after a phone call between U.S. President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the de-facto ruler of the UAE.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry issued a statement supporting the Palestinian administration, saying that the “history and the conscience” of the region’s people will not forget and never forgive the “hypocritical behavior” of the United Arab Emirates in agreeing to a deal with Israel.

“While betraying the Palestinian cause to serve its narrow interests, the UAE is trying to present this as a kind of act of self-sacrifice for Palestine,” the foreign ministry said.

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