WarSclerotic

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to give a speech at a US-Polish conference on the Middle East and Iran, in Warsaw next month, where he will speak out strongly against Iran, Channel 13 news reported Monday.

Netanyahu is expected to be a main speaker at the event organized by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the report said. Also attending will be representatives of Gulf nations including Saudi Arabi, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman.

Iran and the Palestinian Authority have not been invited.

The summit was originally billed as focused on the Iranian threat. However, with Russia and China subsequently vowing to skip the event and many European nations wary of sending senior representatives, US officials are now saying it will focus on Middle East challenges in general, “Iran’s destructive policies in the region” among them.

The conference, which Pompeo said will draw ministers from around the world, comes almost exactly as Iran marks 40 years since its Islamic Revolution and after the United States reimposed sweeping sanctions on the country.

Iran summoned a Polish diplomat to protest the conference, which it called a hostile act.

A Polish official said that, despite serving as co-host, Poland still supports the international agreement on Iran’s nuclear program from which US President Donald Trump withdrew last year.

DAMASCUS, Syria — Syria and Iran signed 11 agreements and memoranda of understanding late Monday, including a “long-term strategic economic cooperation” deal aimed at strengthening cooperation between Damascus and one of its key allies in the civil war that has torn the country apart.

The agreements covered a range of fields including economy, culture, education, infrastructure, investment and housing, the official SANA news agency reported.

They were signed during a visit to Damascus by Iran’s First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri.

Syrian Prime Minister Imad Khamis said it was “a message to the world on the reality of Syrian-Iranian cooperation”, citing “legal and administrative facilities” to benefit Iranian companies wishing to invest in Syria and contribute “effectively to reconstruction.”

The agreements included two memos of understanding between the railway authorities of the two countries as well as between their respective investment promotion authorities.

In relation to infrastructure, there was also rehabilitation of the ports of Tartus and Latakia as well as construction of a 540 megawatt energy plant, according to Khamis.

In addition there were “dozens of projects in the oil sector and agriculture,” he added.

The civil war has taken an enormous toll on the Syrian economy and infrastructure, with the cost of war-related destruction estimated by the UN at about $400 billion.

Bulldozers clears debris in the Syrian city of Raqqa on October 18, 2018. (Delil Souleiman/AFP)

Iran will stand “alongside Syria during the next phase that will be marked by reconstruction,” Jahangiri promised.

Iran and Syria had already signed a military cooperation agreement in August while Tehran has supported Damascus economically during the conflict through oil deliveries and several lines of credit.

The new agreements come against the backdrop of fresh US sanctions against Iran, while Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime and several Syrian businesspeople and companies are already on US and European blacklists.

They also come as Israel has repeatedly pledged to keep arch-foe Iran from entrenching itself militarily in Syria, where the war has already claimed more than 360,000 lives and displaced several million people.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department unsealed criminal charges Monday against Chinese tech giant Huawei, a top company executive and several subsidiaries, alleging the company stole trade secrets, misled banks about its business and violated US sanctions.

In a statement, Huawei denied committing any of the violations cited in the indictment.

The charges were announced just before a crucial two-day round of trade talks between the United States and China are scheduled to begin in Washington. Trade analysts say they could dim prospects for a breakthrough.

The sweeping indictments accuse the company of using extreme efforts to steal trade secrets from American businesses — including trying to take a piece of a robot from a T-Mobile lab.

The executive charged is Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who was arrested in Canada last month. The US is seeking to extradite her, alleging she committed fraud by misleading banks about Huawei’s business dealings in Iran.

David Martin, Meng’s lawyer in Canada, didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment. Meng is out on bail in Vancouver and her case is due back in court Tuesday as she awaits extradition proceedings to begin.

Huawei is the world’s biggest supplier of network gear used by phone and internet companies and has long been seen as a front for spying by the Chinese military or security services.

“The company denies that it or its subsidiary or affiliate have committed any of the asserted violations of US law set forth in each of the indictments,” the company statement said. Huawei is “not aware of any wrongdoing by Ms. Meng,” it added, “and believes the US courts will ultimately reach the same conclusion.”

Prosecutors say Huawei did business in Iran through a Hong Kong company called Skycom and Meng misled US banks into believing the two companies were separate.

Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, center, smiles at a question from a reporter after an announcement of an indictment of Chinese telecommunications companies including Huawei, on violations including bank and wire fraud, Jan. 28, 2019, at the Justice Department in Washington (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

“As I told high-level Chinese law enforcement officials in August, we need more law enforcement cooperation with China,” acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker said at a news conference with other Cabinet officials, including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. “China should be concerned about criminal activities by Chinese companies — and China should take action.”

The officials provided details from a 10-count grand jury indictment in Seattle, and a separate 13-count case from prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York.

Among the accusations, prosecutors say Huawei stole trade secrets, including the technology behind a robotic device that T-Mobile used to test smartphones.

Beginning in 2012, Huawei hatched a plan to steal information about T-Mobile’s robot, named “Tappy,” and Huawei engineers secretly took photos of the robot, measured it and tried to steal a piece of it from T-Mobile’s lab in Washington state, according to prosecutors. T-Mobile declined to comment.

The Huawei case has set off diplomatic spats among the United States, China and Canada. President Donald Trump said he would get involved in the Huawei case if it would help produce a trade agreement with China. But Ross said Monday that the indictments are “wholly separate from our trade negotiations with China.”

The two countries agreed Dec. 1 to negotiate for 90 days in an effort to defuse worsening trade tensions. Trump has postponed a scheduled increase in US tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods from 10 percent to 25 percent during the talks. A breakdown in negotiations would likely lead to higher tariffs, a prospect that has rattled financial markets for months.

Monday’s announcement of criminal charges “is certainly not a propitious sign for US-China trade tensions and could hamper prospects for even a partial deal in the coming weeks,” said Eswar Prasad, an economics professor and China expert at Cornell University.

There is no allegation Huawei was working at the direction of the Chinese government. In past instances, the US government has singled out Beijing in corporate or digital espionage and has recently charged several Chinese hackers and intelligence officials.

The arrest of Meng, the daughter of Huawei’s founder at Vancouver’s airport, has led to the worst relations between Canada and China since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. China detained two Canadians shortly after Meng’s arrest in an apparent attempt to pressure Canada to release her. A Chinese court also sentenced a third Canadian to death in a sudden retrial of a drug case, overturning a 15-year prison term handed down earlier.

Iranian officials continued their anti-Israel rhetoric on Tuesday, threatening to improve the accuracy of their country’s missiles and warning that terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah were prepared to unleash an “inferno” on the Jewish state.

Speaking at a conference on space technology, the secretary of Iran’s National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, was quoted by the Tasnim news agency as saying that “it has been an absolute disgrace for the Zionists when an Israeli minister was proved to be a spy, when there are hundreds of kilometers of tunnels dug underneath their feet, and when the resistance forces in Gaza and Lebanon have missiles with pinpoint accuracy and are ready to respond to any foolish Israeli behavior with an inferno.”

He was referring to the conviction of former minister Gonen Segev of spying for Tehran, and to a recent operation in which the Israel Defense Forces uncovered and destroyed six subterranean passages penetrating into Israel from Lebanon. Israel says they are attack tunnels dug by Lebanese terror group Hezbollah — a close Iranian ally.

Shamkhani also said Tehran has the capabilities to extend its missile range, but won’t do so due to its “defensive doctrine.”

“Iran has no scientific or operational restriction for increasing the range of its military missiles, but based on its defensive doctrine, it is continuously working on increasing the precision of the missiles and has no intention to increase their range,” he said, according to the Reuters news agency.

Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami speaks at the Conference on International Security in Moscow, Russia, April 4, 2018. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

Meanwhile, Iran’s Defense Minister Amir Hatami railed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign against Iran’s missile program, which was among the reasons cited by US President Donald Trump in leaving the landmark 2015 nuclear deal and reimposing crippling sanctions.

“The enemies say Iran’s missile power should be eliminated, but we have repeatedly said our missile capabilities are not negotiable,” Hatami said, according to Reuters.

Shamkhani also hit back at Washington’s demand that Iran halt its satellite-launching project, vowing to continue it “to improve the quality of people’s lives and increase the country’s technological prowess.”

The comments followed a series of reciprocal taunts by Israeli and Iranian leaders in recent weeks as tensions have risen on the Israeli-Syrian border between IDF and Iranian forces.

Last week, Israel reportedly conducted a rare daylight missile attack on Iranian targets in Syria. In response, Iran fired a surface-to-surface missile from Syria at the northern Golan Heights, which was intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system over the Mount Hermon ski resort, according to the Israel Defense Forces.

Hours later, in the predawn hours of January 21, the Israeli Air Force launched retaliatory strikes on Iranian targets near Damascus and on the Syrian air defense batteries that fired upon the attacking Israeli fighter jets, the army said.

Twenty-one people were killed in the Israeli raids in Syria, 12 of them Iranian fighters, a Britain-based Syrian war monitor said the following day. Iran has denied that its citizens were among the dead.

In this photo provided November 5, 2018, by the Iranian Army, a Sayyad 2 missile is fired by the Talash air defense system during drills in an undisclosed location in Iran. (Iranian Army via AP)

On Monday, the deputy head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Tehran’s strategy was to eventually wipe Israel off the “global political map.”

Asked by a reporter in Tehran about Israeli threats to strike Iranian forces deployed in Syria, Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami was quoted by Iranian news outlets as saying, “Our strategy is to erase Israel from the global political map. And it seems that, considering the evil that Israel is doing, it is bringing itself closer to that.”

He added: “We announce that if Israel does anything to start a new war, it will obviously be the war that will end with its elimination, and the occupied territories will be returned. The Israelis will not have even a cemetery in Palestine to bury their own corpses.”

Israel sees Iranian entrenchment in Syria as a major threat and in recent years has carried out hundreds of airstrikes in Syria against targets linked to Iran, which alongside its proxies and Russia is fighting on behalf of the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.