Netanyahu: Israel won’t let Iran get nuclear arms

UNITED NATIONS — Israel’s prime minister declared Tuesday that his country will never allow Iran to get nuclear weapons, even if it has to act alone, and he dismissed the Iranian president’s “charm offensive” as a ruse to get relief from sanctions.

Benjamin Netanyahu told the U.N. General Assembly that Israel’s future is threatened by a “nuclear-armed” Iran seeking its destruction. He urged the international community to keep up biting sanctions against Iran, saying the greater the pressure, the greater the chance for diplomacy to succeed.

Netanyahu accused Iranian President Hassan Rouhani of masterminding Iran’s strategy to advance the country’s nuclear weapons program and said his goal was the same as his hard-line predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“Ahmadinejad was a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Rouhani is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Netanyahu said.

He stressed that all Iranian presidents serve the same “unforgiving regime” where the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is a dictator and the real power.

He also accused Iran of lamenting the human tragedy in Syria, but at the same time directly participating in “Syria’s murder and massacre of innocents.” He said Iran’s regime is propping up the Syrian regime that just used chemical weapons against its own people.