IRAN’S foreign minister yesterday vowed vengeance against Israel for an explosion a day earlier at the Natanz nuclear site that he blamed directly on Tehran’s arch enemy.

“The Zionists want to take revenge because of our progress in the way to lift sanctions ... they have publicly said that they will not allow this. But we will take our revenge from the Zionists,” Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was quoted as saying by state TV.

Israel has all but claimed responsibility for the apparent sabotage operation that damaged the electricity grid at the Natanz site Sunday, with multiple Israeli outlets reporting that Mossad carried out the operation, which is believed to have shut down entire sections of the facility.

The sabotage could set back uranium enrichment at the facility by at least nine months, U.S. officials briefed on the operation told The New York Times.

Iran said yesterday the person who caused the power outage at one of the production halls at Natanz had been identified.

The incident — which came as U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was visiting Israel — could complicate ongoing efforts by Iran and the United States to restore the 2015 nuclear deal, an agreement Tehran signed with major powers in the face of fierce Israeli opposition.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — fighting for his political survival at home — last week vowed that he would not be bound to any agreement that would enable Iran to develop “weapons that threaten our extinction.”

The explosion at the largely underground facility came the day after Iran’s National Nuclear Day, when it inaugurated new advanced centrifuges, another breach of the nuclear deal that Iran has progressively stepped back from since former U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned it three years ago.

Iranian authorities described the incident at Natanz, which has previously been targeted by sabotage attacks, as an act of “nuclear terrorism.”

Iranian Foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh suggested Israel carried out the attack in an attempt to scuttle talks under way in Vienna aimed at salvaging the nuclear agreement

Israel is concerned at the possibility of a return to an agreement it believes could allow Iran to eventually produce an atomic bomb and Netanyahu has promised to do everything in his power to block a return to the deal.

(SD-Agencies)