Iranian legislators voted Sunday on a bill to increase spending of the country’s missile ballistic program.
The overwhelming support for the bill comes after tensions between Iran and U.S. President Donald Trump who imposed new sanctions on the Iranian government.
“The Americans should know that this was our first actions,” Iran’s Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said.
Larijani announced the vote, which received 240 yes votes out of 247 lawmakers, and said the bill aims to “confront terrorist and adventurist actions by the United States in the region.”
The Iranian government had previously said new sanctions imposed by Trump broke the terms of its nuclear deal with the United States and other countries. It had promised an “appropriate and proportional” response.
Iran’s parliament added in the package a half a billion dollars in funding for its missile program along with a series of actions against the American government.
Iran’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee spokesman Seyed Hossein Naghavi Hosseini told the ISNA news agency, the bill “does not undermine the nuclear deal between Iran and the world powers.”
“Iran will never be the first to kill the nuclear deal and take responsibility for its costs,” he said.
The bill also imposed new visa and a travel ban on U.S. military and other organizations that “provided financial, intelligence, military, logistic and training support to terrorists in the region, naming the Islamic State group and the Syrian branch of al-Qaida,” ISNA reported.
Trump signed new sanctions on Iran and other countries in July to include more restrictive measures on Iran.
During his election campaign, President Trump promised to renegotiate the nuclear agreement that then-president Barack Obama had signed into law along with measures against Russia and North Korea.
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