The Islamic Republic of Iran said on Wednesday that it has developed a new missile that can hit U.S. bases in the region and can strike Israel, which it has repeatedly vowed to destroy.
“It is called the Khaibar-buster, a reference to a Jewish castle overrun by Muslim warriors in the early days of Islam,” The Times of Israel reported. “The report said the missile has high accuracy, is manufactured completely domestically, and can defeat missile shield systems. The information has not been independently verified.”
Iranian state-run media claimed that the missile can travel up to 900 miles. It claims that it has other missiles that can travel slightly further distances.
The report comes as the Biden Administration has desperately tried to get Iran to reenter the Iran nuclear deal for months with little success.
“U.S. officials had concluded that under a restored deal, the amount of time Iran would need to amass enough nuclear fuel for a bomb would be significantly less than the one-year goal under the 2015 deal,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “Some former officials say a restored deal could keep the Iranians a safe distance from having sufficient weapons-grade uranium for a bomb for another eight years or so, but that without a deal they could soon be weeks or even days away.”
Robert Einhorn, a former ranking State Department official, said that without a deal Iran will continue to rapidly expand their enrichment program which will “bring them much closer to being a threshold nuclear weapons state.”
“The Gulf Arabs and especially Israel will get very nervous about it,” Einhorn said. “Incentives will increase for a pre-emptive military strike.”
Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), slammed Democrat President Joe Biden for being “on the cusp of providing even greater sanctions relief in return for far less.”
“After five or six years of significant sanctions relief, the Iranian economy would have recovered,” he said. “They would have immunized themselves against our ability to use peaceful sanctions pressure in the future. The question was always not whether we were going to confront Iran. The question was whether we were going to confront Iran in a weaker or stronger position.”
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that three Biden administration negotiators working on trying to get Iran to enter a nuclear deal had left the team because they reportedly believed that Biden was being too soft on Iran.
“U.S. officials confirmed over the weekend that Richard Nephew, the deputy special envoy for Iran, has left the team. Mr. Nephew, an architect of previous economic sanctions on Iran, had advocated a tougher posture in the current negotiations, and he hasn’t attended the talks in Vienna since early December,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “Two other members of the team, which is led by State Department veteran Robert Malley, have stepped back from the talks, the people familiar said, because they also wanted a harder negotiating stance.”