Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Sunday urged world powers to take a hard line against Iran in negotiations aimed at reviving an international nuclear deal, as his top defense and intelligence officials headed to Washington to discuss the flailing talks.

Israel has been watching with concern as world powers sit down with Iran in Vienna in hopes of restoring the tattered 2015 deal. Iran last week struck a hard line as talks resumed, suggesting everything discussed in previous rounds of diplomacy could be renegotiated. Continued Iranian advances in its atomic program have further raised the stakes.

“Iran must start paying a price for its violations,” Bennett said at the Cabinet meeting on Sunday. ” The goal of the Iranian regime is the lifting of sanctions. They went to Vienna with dozens of advisors and experts in sanctions, because that is their goal: The ability to do what they are doing now in terrorism and in the nuclear sphere but with the backing of tens of billions of dollars.”

“We saw an example of the nuclear blackmail I was talking about during the talks in Vienna when it was reported that [Iran] had started enriching uranium by 20 percent in advanced centrifuges in the underground facility in Fordo. This is a very serious step.”

A State Department official told reporters on Motzei Shabbos: “As you all know, we’ve been waiting patiently for five and a half months. The Iranian government said that it needed time to get ready to resume the talks on a mutual return to compliance with the JCPOA, and I think what we’ve seen over the last week or so is what getting ready meant for them. And more importantly, not only did we see it, I think our partners and others – Russia, China, others – have seen – have witnessed what Iran meant by getting ready.”

“It meant continuing to accelerate their nuclear program in particularly provocative ways, and their latest provocation as reported by the IAEA only on Wednesday, i.e. while we were still in the middle of talks, was to prepare for the doubling of their production capacity of 20 percent enriched uranium at Fordow. What getting ready meant was to continue to stonewall the IAEA despite efforts – again, by all of the P5+1 – constructive efforts to find a way forward between Director General Grossi and Iran.”

Last week’s talks in Vienna resumed after a more than five-month hiatus and were the first in which Iran’s new hard-line government participated. European and American negotiators expressed disappointment with Iran’s positions and questioned whether the talks would succeed.

For now, Iran is showing no signs of backing down. Its chief negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani, suggested over the weekend that Iran plans to give a third list of demands to his counterparts. These would include proposed reparations after two pages worth of demands last week.

“Any sanctions in violation and not consistent with the (deal) should be removed immediately,” Bagheri Kani told Al-Jazeera. “All the sanctions which have been imposed or re-imposed under the so-called maximum pressure campaign of the United States should be removed immediately.”

While Iran’s new hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi campaigned on getting sanctions lifted, there’s a sense that his negotiators now are waging their own maximum-pressure campaign.

Last week, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog confirmed that Iran has begun enriching uranium up to 20% purity at its underground facility at Fordo – a site the deal banned from conducting any enrichment.

And over the weekend, Iran said it had tested a surface-to-air missile defense system near its Natanz nuclear facility. Late Saturday, people leaving nearby saw a light in the sky and heard a loud explosion.

“Any threat from the enemies will be met with a decisive and firm response,” state TV quoted Lt. Cmdr. Ali Moazeni as saying.

President Joe Biden has said America is willing to re-enter the deal, though the U.S. is not a direct participant in the latest round of talks due to Washington’s withdrawal. Instead, U.S. negotiators were in a nearby location and briefed by the other participants — including three European powers, China and Russia.

Although Israel is not a party to the negotiations, it has made a point of keeping up lines of communication with its American and European allies during the talks, which are set to resume this week.

Israeli spy chief David Barnea headed to Washington late Saturday on a previously unannounced trip and Defense Minister Benny Gantz leaves Wednesday for meetings with his U.S. counterpart Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid was in London and Paris last week to discuss the talks with Israel’s European allies.

Bennett said Israel was using the time between rounds to convince the Americans to “use a different toolkit” against Iran’s nuclear program, without elaborating. Israel and the U.S. are widely believed to have carried out covert operations against Iranian nuclear personnel and infrastructure in a bid to sabotage the program.

The current Israeli government objects to a return to the 2015 deal, urging instead an accord that addresses other Iranian military behavior, such as its missile program and support for anti-Israel militant groups like Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Israel also supports a “credible” military threat against Iran as leverage.

European negotiators also expressed frustration with the Iranians. Senior diplomats from Germany, Britain and France said Iran has “fast-forwarded its nuclear program” and “backtracked on diplomatic progress.”

“Unclear how these new gaps can be closed in a realistic timeframe on the basis of Iranian drafts,” they said.

Iran maintains its atomic program is peaceful. However, U.S. intelligence agencies and international inspectors say Iran had an organized nuclear weapons program up until 2003. Nonproliferation experts fear any brinkmanship could push Iran toward even more extreme measures to try to force the West to lift sanctions.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem & AP)