IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kohavi warned American officials against rejoining the Iranian nuclear deal while in Washington to discuss the threat posed by Tehran’s nuclear program.
“The Chief of the General Staff emphasized the shortcomings of the current nuclear agreement, which will allow Iran to make significant progress related to centrifuges, as well as to substantially enhance the amount and quality of enriched matter over the next few years, also emphasizing the lack of supervision in terms of nuclear proliferation,” the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said in a statement.
Israel’s top military officer “explained the threat created by returning to the original nuclear agreement and emphasized that all measures should be taken to prevent Iran from achieving military nuclear capabilities,” the statement added.
In light of the close alliance between Israel and the United States, it is rare for a chief of staff to make public remarks about political issues or to criticize the foreign policies of allies.
But Kohavi has made it clear that he views the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as dangerous, saying in January that he has directed the IDF to prepare fresh operational plans to strike Iran in order to stop its nuclear program if necessary.
“Iran can decide that it wants to advance to a bomb, either covertly or in a provocative way. In light of this basic analysis, I have ordered the IDF to prepare a number of operational plans, in addition to the existing ones. We are studying these plans and we will develop them over the next year,” Kohavi said in a January speech at the Institute for National Security Studies think tank’s annual conference.
“The government will, of course, be the one to decide if they should be used. But these plans must be on the table, in existence and trained for,” he added.
Kohavi is in the US on a four-day visit and is holding meetings with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, head of the US Central Command Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, and head of the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) Gen. Richard Clark.
On Tuesday, he held a series of meetings with McKenzie, Clark and other senior CENTCOM officers at the command headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Kohavi also took part in a panel chaired by McKenzie and held a series of intelligence and operational reviews.
The officers discussed common security challenges in the region, including issues related to the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear project, Tehran’s attempt to entrench itself in the Middle East, Hezbollah’s attempts to strengthen itself and the consequences of the Lebanese terror group’s precision missile project.
They also discussed the challenges and related responses in the Palestinian arena, focusing on the Gaza Strip. Kohavi also presented the military’s main takeaways from Operation Guardian of the Walls.
“The IDF’s operational cooperation with the US military is unprecedented in its scope and has reached peaks in its quality,” such as with advanced weapons systems, ballistic missiles and the work done to combat the financing of terror, he said at the end of the visit.
“The current operational cooperation and the planned improvement agreed during the visit attest to the mutual commitment between CENTCOM and the IDF and will make it possible to deal more effectively with the diverse challenges,” Kohavi said.
His visit to Washington and Tampa that was scheduled to take place in April was postponed due to the fighting with Hamas and other terror groups in the Gaza Strip.
Also on Tuesday, Defense Minister Benny Gantz said that the election of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi “proves” that Iran will continue to “develop weapons of mass destruction “that could threaten the world, stability of the region and the State of Israel.”
Speaking at a ceremony where he awarded military campaign pins for Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, Gantz stressed that Israel will not allow the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program to “pass in silence” and that Israel will continue to prevent it.
Following former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s veiled threat against the Biden administration’s policy of seeking to return to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Gantz said “we will always share information, knowledge and coordinate with our friends, especially the United States.”
But, he said, “at the same time, we will always uphold our right, ability and duty to defend ourselves – independently. This is how it was and this is how it will be.”
Referring to the situation in Lebanon, he said that he sees “the plight of the citizens” of the “beautiful country” that “succumbed to terrorism.”
“Lebanon and its citizens are not enemies of Israel: it is Hezbollah that serves the interests of Iran – and as a result, it harms the people of Lebanon first and foremost,” Gantz said.
The defense minister had toured the Lebanese border along with IDF Operations Directorate head Maj.-Gen. Oded Basiok and Northern Command head Maj.-Gen. Amir Baram earlier in the day and held a situational assessment of Israel’s northern front.