Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that an estimate by the head of Mossad, that Iran would have nuclear weapons within four years, was a warning and not an all-clear signal.

The director of the espionage agency, Meir Dagan, told the Knesset Foreign Affairs Defense Committee on Monday that Iran would be in a position to build a nuclear bomb by 2009 at the earliest.

Netanyahu was speaking at a meeting Tuesday with members of the foreign diplomatic corps, to announce an initiative to try the Iranian regime at the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

	Advertisement

The former prime minister said that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would like to establish a 1,000-year Islamic Reich. In an address to a conference of American Jewish organizations last month, Netanyahu compared the present Iranian regime to 1938 Germany and said that Ahmadinejad was planning "another Holocaust."

Former Netanyahu counsel and ambassador to the United Nations, Dore Gold, and MK Dan Naveh are also taking part in the Likud leader's initiative, and traveled to the United States last week in order to kickstart the proposal.

The initiative represents Netanyahu's first advocacy mission before the international community.

According to Netanyahu, who has termed the Iranian nuclear program a "genocidal threat" to Israel, the government of Israel is not giving a firm enough diplomatic response to Iran.

Both the prime minister's bureau and the foreign minister's bureau declined Monday to comment on the initiative.