The Israeli Air Force shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle attempting to penetrate Israeli air-space over the country’s northern Golan Heights. An Israeli military official said the drone was likely an Iranian-built aircraft on a reconnaissance mission for the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, along Israel’s frontier with Syria. The military official further noted that the drone was launched from an air base near Damascus and was shot down with an American-made Patriot interceptor missile over the Golan’s demilitarized zone that separates between Israeli and Syrian forces since the 1967 Middle East War. The incident came just hours before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was due to address the UN General Assembly about the entrenchment in Syria of Iranian and Hezbollah forces that have been helping the regime of President Bashar Assad against Islamist-led rebels.
In his address to the General Assembly, Prime Minister Netanyahu warned of Iran’s ongoing aspirations to spread a curtain of tyranny across the Middle East and its hope to annihilate the Jewish state, threats Netanyahu emphasized would never come to pass, as Israel will act to prevent the Islamic Republic from establishing its military bases across the region. Netanyahu said, “An Iranian curtain is descending across the Middle East. Iran spreads this curtain of tyranny and terror over Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere. And it pledges to extinguish the light of Israel. Today I have a simple message for Ayatollah Khomeini, the dictator of Iran: The light of Israel will never be extinguished,” He said, while adding that Israel “will act to prevent Iran from establishing permanent military bases in Syria for its air, sea and ground forces. We will act to prevent Iran from producing deadly weapons in Syria or in Lebanon for use against us and we will act to prevent Iran from opening a new terror fronts against Israel along our northern border. As long as Iran’s regime seeks the destruction of Israel, Iran will face no fiercer enemy than Israel,” Netanyahu declared.
With regard to the Iranian nuclear agreement, which was reached between world powers and the Islamic Republic in 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged the international community to either change the flawed deal or cancel it all together. The Israeli leader reiterated Jerusalem’s position in which, contrary to the common belief that the agreement thwarts the Islamic Republic’s aspired path to a nuclear bomb, Israel perceives the nuclear deal as actually paving the way for Tehran to achieve nuclear weapon capabilities. Netanyahu explained the dangers of the nuclear agreement, particularly a so-called “sunset clause,” which automatically ends limitations on Iran’s nuclear program within a few years.
In response to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s warning of the so-called sunset clause to the nuclear agreement with Iran, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that the nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic must be changed or else the United States could not remain part of the accord. The American top diplomat, in an interview to Fox News, stressed that the fact that the 2015 agreement with Iran would expire over time was of particular concern for the Trump Administration, pointing to a statement by President Donald Trump in his address to the UN General Assembly, in which the American leader denounced the international agreement as an “embarrassment”, and emphasized that Washington could not abide by an agreement if it provides cover for an eventual construction of a nuclear program.