Israel insists on ‘real solution’ to Iran nuclear crisis

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday insisted on the need for a “real” solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis, after talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

Putin said that the two men discussed the Iranian nuclear stand-off “in detail” at Kremlin talks which overran by several hours. But the Israeli premier was insistent that only the strongest of diplomatic solutions was acceptable for his country.

Netanyahu’s visit to Moscow was seen as a last-minute bid to influence an emerging nuclear deal with Iran strongly opposed by the Jewish state and being discussed by world powers and Iranian diplomats in Geneva.

“We want a peaceful solution, a diplomatic solution, everybody prefers that to any other solution ... but it needs to be a real solution,” said Netanyahu, adding that this would involve Iran halting nuclear work in the same way as Syria was allowing its chemical weapons arsenal to be destroyed.

“I don’t imagine that the international community would have accepted an agreement whereby Syria slightly thinned out its stock of chemical materials, most of it stayed in place and the ability to produce such a weapon remained unchanged,” he said.

“That is more or less what’s on the table in Geneva.”