TEL AVIV, April 21. /TASS/. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the US-Israeli military operation against Iran had removed the "immediate existential threat" to the Jewish state and that, in his view, Israel could otherwise have faced a catastrophe on the scale of the Holocaust involving the use of nuclear weapons.
Netanyahu made the remarks at a state memorial ceremony in Jerusalem marking Memorial Day for the Fallen in War and Victims of Terrorism. His speech was broadcast live across all Israeli television channels.
"The Ayatollah regime in Iran was preparing another Holocaust. It planned to destroy us with nuclear weapons — bombs and thousands of ballistic missiles. If we had not confronted this existential threat, if we had not responded with determination and courage, then Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan (Iranian cities housing nuclear facilities — TASS) could have joined the ranks of Holocaust death camps: Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka," Netanyahu said.
"But that didn’t happen, because together with our great friend, the United States, we crushed the Iranian regime’s destructive machine before it could do any damage. We eliminated this immediate existential threat," he added.
The United States and Israel carried out a military operation against Iran on February 28. Major Iranian cities, including Tehran, were struck. The White House justified the attack by citing alleged missile and nuclear threats from Iran.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced a retaliatory operation, targeting sites in Israel. US sites in Bahrain, Jordan, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Syria were also hit. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and some other key Iranian leaders were killed in the joint US-Israeli attack.
Iran and the United States held several rounds of talks in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad on April 11. The Iranian delegation was led by parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, while Vice President JD Vance headed the US delegation.
Both Tehran and Washington said following the negotiations that no agreement on finding a long-term solution to the conflict had been reached due to a range of disagreements.