Israel and France share a "common" goal of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the Israeli foreign minister said in Paris on Thursday.
Western countries including the United States have long accused Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapon, which Tehran has denied, insisting its enrichment activities were solely for peaceful purposes.
"The most extremist regime in the world shouldn't possess the most dangerous weapon in the world," Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Saar told reporters.
"This objective to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear weapon is a common objective of France and Israel."
Israel is the region's sole, if undeclared, nuclear-armed state. It has long made preventing any rival from matching this capability its top defense priority.
Saar, who met France's Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot earlier Thursday, stressed that Iran was a threat to the entire region and not just to Israel, adding Israel was in talks with France, Britain and the United States.
"We don't exclude a diplomatic path with Iran," he added.
Concern is mounting as talks with Iran appear to have reached an impasse, while the window for negotiating a new treaty with Tehran is set to close in the fall.
Key aspects of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal that Iran signed with world powers in 2015, are due to expire in October. US President Donald Trump already took the US out of the deal during his last mandate.
Saar said he had invited France's top diplomat to visit Israel.
"I have a continuous dialogue, an ongoing dialogue, with the French foreign minister," he said.
On Wednesday, Barrot warned that a military confrontation with Iran would be "almost inevitable" if talks over Tehran's nuclear programme failed.
Trump said in early March he had written to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to call for nuclear negotiations and warn of possible military action if Tehran refused.
He has threatened that Iran will be bombed if it persists in developing nuclear weapons. Khamenei has promised to hit back.
With AFP
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