Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, on Friday accused Iran of seeking to impose ‘religious hegemony’ across the Middle East and urged the international community to take the ‘necessary steps’ to stop the Islamic republic building a nuclear weapon.

‘If bombs and terror meet, the world will be ungovernable,’ Mr Peres, on his first foreign tour as president, told reporters at the Ambrosetti forum on the shores of Italy’s Lake Como. Iran’s ambitions were to govern the region ‘by their religion only’, he said.