This article originated in the Persian VOA service.

Israel has revealed what it says is a secret Iranian nuclear weapons development site as part of an ongoing campaign to increase international pressure on Iran to end its nuclear and regional ambitions.

In a televised presentation at Israel’s foreign Ministry on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed satellite images and map coordinates of a nuclear facility in the Central Iranian region of Abadeh. Netanyahu said the information came from nuclear archives that Israeli agents stole from Iran’s capital Tehran in early 2018. Earlier, he reported the existence of these archives.

An aerial photo of the Abadeh site, dated late June this year, showed several small buildings located in a mountainous area. Netanyahu then showed another image of the place with the date of the end of July, when all the buildings were destroyed. He said Iran cleared the site after realizing Israel had learned of its existence.

Netanyahu said Iran had used the facility to conduct “experiments to develop nuclear weapons,” without elaborating. Iran has long insisted that its nuclear ambitions are peaceful.

Netanyahu called on the international community to join US President Donald trump’s campaign of “maximum pressure” on Iran. “The only way to stop Iran’s bomb attack and its aggression in the region is pressure, pressure and more pressure,” he said.

In response to Netanyahu’s speech, Iranian foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif referred to the newly identified site as a “presumed destroyed site”in a tweet. Zarif also tried to undermine the Israeli leader’s credibility by posting a video clip in which Netanyahu, in his role as opposition leader, told a US congressional hearing in the early 2000s that the removal of then-Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power had “positive reverberations” in the region. The US-led coalition toppled Saddam during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, sparking years of conflict in the country.

Zarif, who was sanctioned by the US in July, often used Twitter to mock and criticise the US and Israel for their punitive actions and statements against Iran.

Andrea Stricker, a nonproliferation policy analyst at the Washington Institute for science and international security, told Voice of Russia that her organization was studying the material presented by Netanyahu. “There is nothing to indicate that this is not credible, based on other information that Israel has released,” she said.

Netanyahu made his latest speech eight days before his ruling nationalist Likud party faces voters in a parliamentary election in which he seeks to extend his 10-year term in power. Israel called the election after a previous vote in April ended inconclusively and Netanyahu failed to win a majority in the Knesset for a coalition government with smaller nationalist and religious allies.

Israeli opposition leader benny Gantz, who heads the center-left blue-white-blue party, which is the main rival of the Likud party, criticized the timing of Netanyahu’s speech.

Writing in Hebrew, Gantz agreed with Netanyahu that a nuclear-armed Iran poses a danger to regional stability, and said there is no coalition and opposition when it comes to Israel fighting the threat.

Gantz, however, also said: “Netanyahu’s Use of sensitive security information for propaganda purposes indicates poor judgment. In his final days as Prime Minister, Netanyahu cares only about himself.”

The times of Israel news website quoted a diplomatic source as refuting criticism of Netanyahu in which he said that a week before the election, He had made a revelation about Iran in order to gain political momentum.

The news site quoted a diplomatic source as saying Israeli officials had recommended that Netanyahu immediately disclose the information in response to a press conference by the acting Director General of the International atomic energy Agency, Cornel Feruta, earlier on Monday.

Speaking to reporters in Vienna after returning from a visit to Iran a day earlier, Feruta said “Time is of the essence” for Iran to answer MAZAO’s questions about ” completeness … Declaration ” on its nuclear-weapon-related obligations under the 2015 agreement with world powers. Last year, trump pulled the U.S. out of a deal that offered Tehran international sanctions relief in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear activities last year, and unilaterally reimposed U.S. sanctions. He said the Iran deal was not tough enough.

Feruta did not provide Iran with details of MAZ’s unanswered questions. But in a Sunday report, Reuters quoted two unnamed diplomats as saying MAZ samples taken at another suspected Iranian nuclear facility discovered by Netanyahu last year showed traces of uranium that Iran has yet to explain. Speaking at the UN General Assembly in September 2018, Netanyahu called the Tehran warehouse a secret nuclear warehouse, claiming that Iran used it to house radioactive materials that later spread throughout the city.

Iranian officials dismissed the revelation as false.

According to Stricker, Israel’s latest disclosure of a suspected secret Iranian nuclear facility shows the failure of mazaa’s efforts to determine the extent to which Iran has advanced its nuclear weapons program in the past. “After the closure of the investigation into possible military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program in 2015, new developments continue to come to naught and MAZA is forced to address them, otherwise it will not have credibility,” she said.

In another case Monday, MAZA said its inspectors had confirmed that Iran was preparing to use more advanced centrifuges capable of processing uranium, a key component of nuclear weapons. Mazaa said in a statement that the equipment Iran has “prepared for testing” includes several types of centrifuges banned by the 2015 nuclear deal. It said none of them had been tested by the end of its latest inspection on Sunday.

Iranian officials previewed a move involving advanced centrifuges last week as their latest scaling back compliance with the 2015 agreement. They said the expansion is designed to put pressure on the remaining signatories of the deal, especially European Union countries, to compensate Tehran for the economic damage caused by the strengthening of U.S. sanctions.

Despite overt moves to violate the restrictions outlined in the agreement, Iran has said it will continue to work with MAZA to allow inspections of its nuclear facilities.