It is years since Israel crossed red line: Iranian defense minister

TEHRAN,Sept.30(MNA) – Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi said on Saturday that it has been years that the Zionist regime, which possesses nuclear weapons, has crossed the red line. Vahidi made the remarks in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday during which he held up a cartoon-like drawing of a bomb with a fuse and literally drew a red line just below a label reading “final stage” to a nuclear bomb, which he claimed Iran will be on the brink of developing in less than a year. “If the possession of nuclear bombs means crossing the red line, it has been years that the Zionist regime, which has tens of nuclear warheads and various types of weapons of mass destruction, has crossed the red line,” Vahidi said. It is the hawkish and occupying Zionist regime that should be pressured by the international community, not independent and peace-loving countries that are using nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, he said. “Is an occupying and aggressive regime like the Zionist regime, which has nuclear bombs and threatens to launch military attack, dangerous or a nuclear weapons-free Iran, which has called for nuclear disarmament more than others and is only seeking to use peaceful nuclear energy within the framework of international regulations and the NPT (nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty)?” Commenting on the 12-day International Mine Countermeasures Exercise 2012 (IMCMEX 12), which the United States began conducting in the Persian Gulf on September 16 in cooperation with a number of its allies, the defense minister said the exercise was only a “publicity stunt.” “The United States had claimed that the minesweeping exercise would be held with the participation of 40 countries, but only four or five countries took part in the exercise,” he said. Staging such a weak military exercise in the Persian Gulf was a disgrace to Washington, he added.