Yair Lapid
Yair LapidHezki Ezra

Yesh Atid party chairman MK Yair Lapid said Monday that the deal being finalized between Iran and the P5+1 powers is “a bad deal, which endangers the security of Israel and the world's security.”

"The Iranians are lying, and the world wants to be lied to,” he stressed. “They lied about the reavtor at Natanz, they lied about the percentages of enrichment at the Fordow reactor, they lied about their military plan and they lied about the plutonium reactor at Arak.”

"The fact that after all this, the powers gave in to them on the matter of supervision, is incomprehensible,” he stated. “The citizens of Israel need to understand: according to the agreement, if the International Agency for Atomic Energy inspectors suspect that the Iranians are cheating, they have to inform the committee 24 days ahead of time that they want to carry out an inspection, and then even if they receive the go-ahead, they must not enter unaccompanied into the nuclear sites.”

This is not an inspection regime but “a mockery,” he said. “In the next month, we need to work vis-employ a different tactic vis-a-vis Congress. We should not ask our friends in the Senate and Congress to try and topple all the sections in the agreement, because then they don't listen to us, but to concentrate on the matter of inspection, which is the Achilles heel, the weakest point in the agreement.”

"I started to conduct talks with them on this matter in my visit to Washington last month,” Lapid said, “and on this issue they are willing to listen. We have to ask them to insist only on this point and to say that without real inspection they will not approve the remval of sanctions.”

Lapid argued that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is not the man who should lead the campaign vis-avis the US administration, because “the White House's door is closed before him, half of Congress won't listen to him.” He called on Netanyahu to resign.