Top Israeli defense officials rejected on Friday President Barack Obama’s assertion that Israel’s security establishment now “acknowledges” that the nuclear deal with Iran “has been a game changer” and a benefit to the Jewish state’s security.

“The Israeli security establishment believes that agreements only have value if they are based on existing reality and have no value if the facts on the ground are entirely opposite,” the Israeli Defense Ministry said in a statement, noting that Iran “has explicitly and publicly stated that its goal is the destruction of the State of Israel.”

The security establishment, like the Israeli people and many others around the world, understands that agreements of this type between the world powers and Iran are not advantageous and only damage the uncompromising struggle that must be waged against terrorist states like Iran.

“I don’t know to which Israelis [Obama] spoke recently,” Likud member of Knesset Tzachi Hanegbi, a minister in the Prime Minister’s office and recently the chair of the Knesset’s influential Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, told the Times of Israel. “But I can promise you that the position of the prime minister, the defense minister and of most senior officials in the defense establishment has not changed. The opposite is the case. The time that has elapsed since the deal was signed proved all our worries that, regrettably, we were justified before the deal was made.”

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot did say in January that the deal potentially offered “opportunities,” but tempered his assessment by acknowledging that it also increased “challenges” for Israel.

A senior Israeli official told the Times that the deal “removes the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program based on dates certain, rather than on changes in Iran’s aggressive behavior, including its support for terrorism around the world. The deal doesn’t solve the Iranian nuclear problem, but rather delays and intensifies it.”

[Photo: Marc Israel Sellem / Flash90 ]