• Friday, 22 November 2024

Differences over Iran deal highlighted at Scholz-Lapid talks

Differences over Iran deal highlighted at Scholz-Lapid talks
Berlin, 12 September 2022 (dpa/MIA) - Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid used his first official visit to Germany on Monday to pursue his campaign to end international nuclear negotiations with Iran. Speaking after a meeting with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he said: "It is time to move past the failed negotiations with Iran. They cannot and will not achieve the goal we all share – to stop Iran getting a nuclear weapon." Efforts are currently under way to revive the 2015 international nuclear agreement with Iran, after it was effectively shelved when the US left the deal in 2018. Germany is one of the countries campaigning for a return. However, the ongoing talks with Tehran are considered deadlocked. "Returning to the nuclear agreement, under the current conditions, would be a critical mistake," Lapid said in Berlin. He had showed Scholz "sensitive and relevant intelligence information" on the issue, he said. Scholz, for his part, said that he saw little prospect of a quick agreement on proposals set out by European negotiators. "There is no reason for Iran not to agree to these proposals, but one must accept that this is currently not the case and will certainly not happen soon," Scholz said. Lapid also used the occasion to thank Scholz for condemning statements in August by visiting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust. Scholz did not respond to this in the press conference and only distanced himself clearly the following day, which was criticized by many as too late. On Monday afternoon, Scholz and Lapid plan to visit the Berlin memorial at the House of the Wannsee Conference, where high-ranking Nazis met in 1942 to plan the mass murder of Jews. Lapid is himself the son of a Holocaust survivor.