Israeli opposition leaders have criticised a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement signed between the US and Saudi Arabia, describing it as a \u201cmajor failure\u201d for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s government.<\/p>\n
The US Energy Department announced on Wednesday that Washington and Riyadh had signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement.<\/p>\n
In a statement, the department said US Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed the agreement, commonly known as a 123 Agreement.<\/p>\n
It said the deal represents an important step in strengthening peaceful nuclear cooperation between Washington and Riyadh and will be submitted to the US Congress for review under established procedures before entering into force.<\/p>\n
Following the announcement, Israeli opposition leaders accused Netanyahu\u2019s government on Thursday of failing to prevent the agreement.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis agreement is a massive diplomatic failure for our government,\u201d former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the opposition Together party, told Israel\u2019s public broadcaster KAN.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe agreement was reached without our knowledge, and we are being excluded because we are not an active party in the negotiations between the United States and Iran,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
\u2018Major failure\u2019<\/p>\n
Former defence minister Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the opposition Yisrael Beiteinu party, also described the agreement as a \u201cmajor and catastrophic failure\u201d for Netanyahu, saying the prime minister had long highlighted his command of English and familiarity with the US administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe agreement pushes the entire Middle East into a nuclear arms race,\u201d Lieberman told Israel\u2019s 103 FM radio.<\/p>\n
He said allowing uranium enrichment on Saudi territory without normalisation between Riyadh and Israel represented an \u201caccumulated failure\u201d by the Israeli government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Israeli opposition leaders have criticised a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement signed between the US and Saudi Arabia, describing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":555806,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-555805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=555805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555805\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/555806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=555805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=555805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=555805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}