(JTA) — Statements by Iran’s new president on removing Israel from the Middle East show his policies are as dangerous as his predecessor’s, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu reacted Friday to statements attributed to Iran’s new president, Hassan Rohani, by Iran’s semi-official ISNA news agency.

“The Zionist regime has been a wound on the body of the Islamic world for years and the wound should be removed,” ISNA quoted Rohani as saying on Friday.

Netanyahu said in a statement that Rohani, who won a landslide victory in Iran’s June 14 presidential election and is seen by some Western analysts as more moderate than his predecessor, had “revealed his true face sooner than expected.”

“This is what the man is thinking and this is the Iranian regime’s plan of action,” Netanyahu said in a statement Friday. “This statement should awaken the world from the illusion some have taken to entertaining since the elections in Iran.

That statement could be seen as being aimed at U.S. President Obama and a number of U.S. lawmakers who have said Rohani’s expressed willingness to make Iran’s nuclear program more transparent should be tested.

“The president was replaced but the goal of the regime remained obtaining nuclear weapons to threaten Israel, the Middle East and the safety of the world,” Netanyahu said. “A country which threatens to destroy Israel must not have weapons of mass destruction.”

Rohani, who is scheduled to be inaugurated in two days, reportedly made the statement about Israel after taking part in an annual pro-Palestine rally, International Quds Day, in Tehran on Friday. The event, which is held annually since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and which protests Israel’s control of Jerusalem, drew hundreds of thousands of participants in Tehran, according to news agencies.

Rohani is believed to have garnered the votes of Iran’s more reform-minded voters, although he is a veteran of the ruling clerical establishment and his candidacy was authorized by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In his own Quds Day remarks, Khamenei vowed that “Palestine will be free” and predicted the emergence of a new “Islamic Middle East.”

Last year, Ahmadinejad used a Quds Day event to call for the elimination of the “insult to all humanity” that is Israel, and said that confronting it constitutes an effort to “protect the dignity of all human beings.” He too expressed confidence in the emergence of “a new Middle East” with no trace of Americans or of Zionists.