War in Middle East: Freely defended action against Iran’s “terrorist regime”

Chancellor’s head Thorsten Frei defended the support for the Israeli attacks on Iran expressed by Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “What the Chancellor expressed in his words was that it could not be in our interest that a terrorist regime like the Iranian Mullah regime is owned by the nuclear weapon,” said the CDU politician in an interview by the German Press Agency.

But it’s not just about the nuclear weapons. “Racetry technology in Iran is also the case that medium -range missiles can achieve very far -reaching goals in Europe. And that’s why we can’t pretend that we were not concerned with anything,” said Frei.

The CDU chairman Merz said on the edge of the G7 summit in Canada on ZDF on the Israeli attacks on nuclear facilities and Iranian leadership staff: “This is the dirty work, the Israel does for all.” However, the reporter had already used the term “dirty work” in her question. Merz expressed “greatest respect” that the Israeli army or state leadership “had the courage to do that”. After that, he was criticized, among other things, for the choice of words, but also for the support of the attacks.

Free: classification of international law not yet possible

Frei did not want to evaluate whether the attacks are covered by international law. “Today we simply do not have the knowledge that would be necessary in order to be able to finally be able to make such a international law,” he said. But the fact is that Israel acted like this because it was massively threatened. Iran’s state -political goal is to destroy Israel. “This is the fact that everything can be assessed on.”

The head of the Chancellor emphasized that even after the Israeli attacks on Iran, Germany was responsible for doing everything that Israel could defend. “And the federal government has felt committed to this in the past and the Federal Government also feels committed to this today and in the future.”

Arms exports approved for four million euros

The Federal Government has therefore approved the delivery of weapons and other armaments to Israel in recent decades, although it is a crisis area – an exception that is currently only being made for Ukraine. The new federal government also allowed arms exports for almost four million euros to Israel in the first five weeks of its term, as the Ministry of Economic Affairs only announced at the request of the left faction. Compared to the first quarter of 2025, in which the red-green minority government had approved armor deliveries worth 28 million euros to Israel, this is rather little.

Frei said, however, that this was not easily comparable. “You would have to compare larger periods in order to actually recognize that a strategy could hide behind it,” he told the dpa. “This is not the case here, but the attitude towards Israel has not changed by the federal government.”