US National Security Adviser John Bolton said on Tuesday in Jerusalem that President Donald Trump is open to real negotiations and "all that Iran needs to do is walk through that open door."
Bolton spoke at a high-profile trilateral security summit on Tuesday, attended by his Israeli and Russian counterparts Meir Ben-Shabbat and Nikolai Patrushev, along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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The prime minister welcomed Patrushev to Israel, thanking him and Russian President Vladimir Putin for agreeing to attend the summit in Jerusalem.
Addressing the threat posed by the Iranian regime, Netanyahu said, "I am certain that from this perspective … it is understood in Russia the significance for us of a regime that calls for our destruction, not just to conquer us but to destroy us, and is daily acting to achieve this goal."
He continued: "Therefore, Israel will not allow Iran, which calls for our destruction, to entrench on our border; we will do everything to prevent it from attaining nuclear weapons. Self-defense is a very important lesson of 20th-century history, certainly for the Jewish people and its state."
Netanyahu also revealed that Putin is expected to visit Israel later this year "in order to lay the cornerstone of the monument commemorating the siege of Leningrad, and also to begin the events commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz."
Echoing the prime minister's sentiments, Ben-Shabbat said, "The attainment of security and stability in our region is our common goal. Other nations and peoples in and beyond the region also aspire to it. It will be unattainable without reining in Iran's aspirations and actions. Recent events underscore this conclusion, which must be taken into account in any outline for an agreement."
Bolton went on to say that American envoys were surging across the region in hopes of finding a path out of escalating tensions between the US and Iran but that the silence of the Islamic Republic has been "deafening."
"There is simply no evidence that Iran has made the strategic decision to renounce nuclear weapons," he said.
His comments alongside his Israeli and Russian counterparts come after Iran slammed the Trump administration over new US sanctions targeting the country's leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Iran's Foreign Ministry said the measures spell a "permanent closure" to diplomacy between the US and Iran.
