Netanyahu to visit Washington next week to meet with Trump
Jerusalem: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday he will travel to Washington next week to meet US President Donald Trump and other officials.
Speaking to a meeting of his Cabinet, Netanyahu did not elaborate on the contents of his visit, except to say he will discuss a trade deal.
Netanyahu’s visit comes as Trump has signalled he is ready for Israel and Hamas to wind down the war in Gaza, which is likely to be a focus of their talks. Iran, following the 12-day war with Israel, is also expected to be a main topic of discussion.
Meanwhile, Iran is assessing the damage and lashing out over the American and Israeli airstrikes on its nuclear sites, though Tehran kept open the possibility Tuesday of resuming talks with the Washington over its atomic programme.
The comments by government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani also included another acknowledgment that the American strikes at Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz — key sites within Iran’s programme — had been “seriously damaged” by the bombing. Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency quoted Mohajerani as making the remarks at a briefing for journalists.
That acknowledgment comes as Iran’s theocracy has slowly begun to admit the scale of the damage wrought by the 12-day war with Israel, which saw Israeli fighter jets decimate the country’s air defences and conduct strikes at will over the Islamic Republic. And keeping the door open to talks with the United States likely shows Tehran wants to avoid further economic pain as another deadline over UN sanctions loom.
“No date (for US talks) is announced, and it’s not probably very soon, but a decision hasn’t been made in this field,” Mohajerani said.
Iran offers rising death toll
Israeli airstrikes, which began June 13, decimated the upper ranks of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard and targeted its arsenal of ballistic missiles. The strikes also hit Iran’s nuclear sites, which Israel claimed put Tehran within reach of a nuclear weapon.
US intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency had assessed Iran last had an organised nuclear weapons programme in 2003, though Tehran had been enriching uranium up to 60% — a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%.
On Monday, Iranian judiciary spokesman Asghar Jahangir offered a sharply increased, government-issued death toll from the war. He said that the Israeli attacks killed 935 “Iranian citizens,” including 38 children and 102 women, IRNA reported. “The enemy aimed to change the country’s circumstances by assassinating military commanders and scientists, intending to spread fear and exert pressure,” Jahangir added. However, he asserted — like others up to 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — that Iran had “won” the war.
Iran has a long history of offering lower death counts around unrest over political considerations. The Washington-based Human Rights Activists group, which has provided detailed casualty figures from multiple rounds of unrest in Iran, has put the death toll at 1,190 people killed, including 436 civilians and 435 security force members. The attacks wounded another 4,475 people, the group said.
Meanwhile, it appears that Iranian officials now are assessing the damage done by the American strikes conducted on the three nuclear sites on June 22, namely those at Fordo, a site built under a mountain about 100 kilometers southwest of Tehran.
