Herzlia, Israel  - Iran is the biggest threat facing not just Israel but humanity, and time to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons is running out, Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday.

Netanyahu, whom polls predict as winner of next Tuesday's Israeli election, told an international conference in Herzlia, north of Tel Aviv, that his biggest mission if elected "will be to deal with the Iran threat."

Iran, he said, presented a new type of threat, that of linkage between a fanatical religious regime and nuclear weapons.

Describing it as the biggest threat facing Israel, perhaps since the state's founding in 1948, he said that "we will act, on a real level in order to neutralise this danger."

He sounded equally tough against the Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip, saying that if Israel wanted to remove the missiles militants fire regularly from the salient, "we have no choice but to remove the regime in Gaza."

He slammed the Israeli government for ending its recent offensive in the Gaza Strip before completely shutting the Hamas weapons pipeline via the Sinai peninsula.

"The government stopped the (22-day) Gaza operation too early," he said.

Netanyahu accused Iran of "utilizing every opportunity" to work against peace, saying that any part of the occupied Palestinian territories will be "taken over by Iran", in the form of its Hamas proxy.

"The moderate forces of the Palestinian Authority are not sufficiently strong to undertake they minimal concessions they have to make to come to a long-term agreement, and they are not sufficiently strong to combat terrorism," he charged.

He said the best way to strengthen the moderate elements in the Palestinian Authority (PA) was not by making unilateral concessions, and not by not doing anything, but by choosing what he termed "a third way" of promoting political negotiations while at the same time fostering the political development of the PA and strengthening its police system.

"This is not an alternative to political process, but this is the way to get there," he said. (dpa)