AKIPRESS.COM - Israeli PM claims ‘new and conclusive proof’ shows Iran hid nuclear weapons, though evidence had been seen by UN watchdog, The Guardian reports.

Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Iran of continuing to hide and expand its nuclear weapons knowhow after a 2015 agreement with global powers, presenting what the Israeli prime minister claimed was “new and conclusive proof” of violations.

Netanyahu presented a series of slides and photographs of documents that he said were drawn from a half-ton cache obtained by Israeli intelligence “a few weeks ago”. The New York Times reported that Mossad had broken into a warehouse in January and smuggled them to Israel the same night. The report did not say how such a large amount of documentation was transported in secret.

However, key documents highlighted by Netanyahu had previously been seen by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as early as 2005 and made public by the agency in 2011.

“Iran lied, big time,” he said, speaking from Israel’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv. “Iran is brazenly lying when it said it never had a nuclear weapons programme.”

Netanyahu’s presentation came less than two weeks before Donald Trump is due to decide whether to continue to abide by the 2015 deal by waiving US sanctions on Iran. Asked about the Israeli evidence on Monday, Trump said it proved he was “100% right” about the flaws of the agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action (JCPOA).