PUBLICATIONS 2
ARTICLE
New and unknown deadly weapons used by Israeli forces New and unknown deadly weapons used by Israeli forces
'Direct energy' weapons, chemical and/or biological agents, in a macabre experiment of future warfare
By Professor Paola Manduca
By now there are countless reports, from hospitals, witnesses, armament experts and journalists that strongly suggest that in the present offensive of Israeli forces against Lebanon and Gaza 'new weapons' are being used.
New and strange symptoms are reported amongst the wounded and the dead.
Bodies with dead tissues and no apparent wounds; 'shrunken' corpses; civilians with heavy damage to lower limbs that require amputation, which is nevertheless followed by unstoppable necrosis and death; descriptions of extensive internal wounds with no trace of shrapnel, corpses blackened but not burnt, and others heavily wounded that did not bleed.
Many of these descriptions suggest the possibility that the new weapons used include 'direct energy' weapons, and chemical and/or biological agents, in a sort of macabre experiment of future warfare, where there is no respect for anything: International rules (from the Geneva Convention to the treaties on biological and chemical weapons), refugees, hospitals and the Red Cross, not to mention the people, their future, their children, the environment, which is poisoned through dissemination of Depleted Uranium and toxic substances released after oil and chemical depots are bombed.
Right now, the Lebanese and Palestinian people have many urgent and impellent problems, yet many people believe that these episodes cannot and must not pass ignored. In fact several appeals have been launched to scientists and experts with a view to investigating the issue.
With the intent of responding to such appeals, we have set up a team to investigate the testimonies, the images, and possibly the material evidence that delegations and NGOs will be able to bring from the affected areas. We want to offer support to the health institutions of Lebanon and Palestine, which ask constantly for help and external verification and monitoring, and we are examining all available materials in order to formulate hypotheses which can be verified or disproved.
We ask for the active participation of our (Italian) scientific institutions, and, following the request from medical personnel in the conflict area, we are requesting that the UN set up a international independent verification and investigation committee, with a view to facilitating entry into conflict zone, as well as collecting material and testimonies directly in the field, and undertaking inquries and verificaitons concerning the various claims regarding these new kinds of weapons of mass destruction being used by Israeli forces in Lebanon. We request that such investigating teams be set up immediately, and that procedures be defined and implemented with a view to supporting future investigations. Of particular concern is the issue of how to collect and store samples from the different theatres, with a view to preserving important information regarding the various impacts of these weapons.
We ask that the international committee have access to all sources of information, that is be fully operational, while abiding by relevant investigative procedures, including cross-checking of information between different laboratories. The international committee is to report to the competent authorities, including Human Rights tribunal and international courts, if appropriate..
As people and as scientists, we are offering our time and expertise in order to reach an understanding of the underlying facts, in the belief that a perspective of justice, equity and peace among people can be reached only with the respect of the rules defined up to now within the international community of nations. The issue pertains to the behavior of the parties in an armed conflict.
We ask that the respect of these rules be verified in the context of the present conflict.
We invite scientists to contribute to this effort by offering their specific competences. In particular we seek collaboration of toxicology experts, pharmacologists, anatomy pathologists, doctors with an expertise in trauma and burns, chemists.
They can reach the working group at the E-mail address: nuovearmi@gmail.com Paola Manduca, Professor of.Genetics, University of Genova, Italy.
Source:globalresearch.ca, 7-8-2006. Date: 08/08/2006 Time 16:47 --- The lies "Israel" tells itself & that we tell on its behalf When journalists use the word "apparently", or another favorite "reportedly"... The lies "Israel" tells itself & that we tell on its behalf
When journalists use the word "apparently", or another favorite "reportedly"...
By Jonathan Cook
When journalists use the word "apparently", or another favorite "reportedly", they are usually distancing themselves from an event or an interpretation in the supposed interests of balance. But I think we should read the "apparently" contained in a statement from the head of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, relating to the killing this week of four unarmed UN monitors by the Israeli army in its other sense.
When Annan says that those four deaths were "apparently deliberate", I take him to mean that the evidence shows that the killings were deliberate. And who can disagree with him? At least 10 phone calls were made to Israeli commanders over a period of six hours warning that artillery and aerial bombardments were either dangerously close to or hitting the monitors building.
The UN post, in Khaim just inside south Lebanon, was clearly marked and well-known to the army, but nonetheless it was hit directly four times in the last hour before an Israeli helicopter fired a precision-guided missile that tore through the roof of an underground shelter, killing the monitors inside. A UN convoy that arrived too late to rescue the peacekeepers was also fired on. From the evidence, it does not get much more deliberate than that.
The problem, however, is that Western leaders, diplomats and the media take the "apparently" in its first sense -- as a way to avoid holding "Israel" to account for its actions. For "apparently deliberate", read "almost certainly accidental". That was why the best the UN Security Council could manage after a day and a half of deliberation was a weasly statement of "shock and distress" at the killings, as though they were an act of God.
Our media are no less responsible for this evasiveness. They make sure "we" -- the publics of the West -- never countenance the thought that a society like our own, one we are always being reminded is a democracy, could sink to the depths of inhumanity required to murder unarmed peacekeepers. Who can be taken seriously challenging the Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livnis assertion that "There will never be an [Israeli] army commander that will intentionally aim at civilians or UN soldiers [sic]"?
Even the minority in the West who have started to fear that "Israel" is "apparently" slaughtering civilians across Lebanon or that it is "apparently" intending to make refugees of a million Lebanese must presumably shrink from the idea that "Israel" is also capable of killing unarmed UN monitors.
After all, our media insinuate, the two cases are not comparable.
There may be good reasons why Lebanese civilians need to suffer. Let us not forget that they belong to a people (or is it a race or, maybe, a religion?) that gave birth to Hizbullah. "We" can cast aside our concerns for the moment and take it on trust that "Israel" has cause to kill the Lebanese or make them homeless. Doubtless the justifications will emerge later, when we have lost interest in the "Lebanon crisis". We may never hear what those reasons were, but who can doubt that they exist?
The "apparent" murder of four UN monitors, however, is a deeper challenge to our faith in our moral superiority, which is why that "apparently" is held on to as desperately as a talisman. No civilized country could kill peacekeepers, especially ones drawn from our own societies, from Canada, Finland and Austria? That is the moral separation line that divides us from the terrorists. Were that line to be erased, we would be no different from those whom we must fight.
An iconic image of this war that our media have managed to expunge from the official record but which keeps popping up in email inboxes like a guilty secret is of young Israeli girls, lipsticked and nailpolished as if on their way to a party, drawing messages of death and hatred on the sides of the missiles about to be loaded on to army trucks and tanks. In one, an out-of-focus soldier stands on a tank paternally watching over the girls as they address another death threat to Hizbullah leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Is this the truer face of Israeli society, even if it is the one we are never shown and refuse to believe in. And are "we" in the West hurtling down the same path?
Driving through the Jewish city of Upper Nazareth this week, I realized how inured I am becoming to this triumphal militarism -- and the racism that feeds it. Nothing surprising about the posters of "We will win" on every hoarding. But it takes me more than a few seconds to notice that the Magen David ambulance in front of me is flying a little national flag, the blue Star of David, from its window. I have heard that American fire engines flew US flags after 9/11, but this somehow seems worse. How is it possible for an ambulance, the embodiment of our neutral, civilized, universal, "Western", humanitarian values, to fly a national flag, I think to myself? And does it make a difference that only a few months ago Magen David joined the International Committee of the Red Cross?
Only slowly do my thoughts grow more disturbed: how many hospital adminstrators, doctors and nurses have seen that ambulance arrive at their emergency departments and thought nothing of it? And is that the only Israeli ambulance flying the flag, or are many others doing the same? Later the BBC TV news answers my question. I see two ambulances with the same flags going to the front line to collect casualties. Will others soon cross over the border into southern Lebanon, after it is "secured", and will no one mention those little flags fluttering from the window?
A psychologist tells me how upset she is about a meeting she attended a few days ago of the northern coordinating committee of her profession. They were discussing how best to treat the shock and trauma suffered by Israeli children under the bombardment from Hizbullah. The meeting concluded with an agreement that the psychologists would reassure the children with the statement: "The army is there to protect us."
And so, the seeds of fascism are unthinkingly sown for another generation of children, children like our own.
No one agreed with my friend when she dissented, arguing that this was not the message to be telling impressionable minds, and that violence against the Other is not a panacea for our problems. Parents, not soldiers, are responsible for protecting their children, she pointed out. Tanks, planes and guns bring only fear and more hatred, hatred that will one day return to haunt us.
The slow, gentle indoctrination continues day in, day out, reinforcing the idea among the "Israeli" Jewish population that the army can do no wrong and that it needs no oversight, not even from politicians (most of whom are former generals anyway, or like the prime minister Ehud Olmert too frightened to stand up to the chiefs of staff if they wanted to). "We will win". How do we know we will win? Because "the army is there to protect us." Add into the mix that faceless "Arab" enemy, those sub-beings, and you have a recipe for fascism -- even if it is of the democratically elected variety.
The Israeli media, of course, are the key to providing the second half of that equation -- or rather not providing it. You can sit watching the main Israeli channels all day, flicking between channels 1, 2 and 10, and not see a Lebanese face, apart from that of Hassan Nasrallah, "the new Hitler". I do not mean the charred faces of corpses, or the bandaged babies, or the amputees lying in hospital beds. I mean any Lebanese faces. Just as you almost never see a Palestinian face on Israeli TV unless they are the mob, disfigured with hatred as they hold aloft another martyr on his way to burial.
Lebanon only swings in to view on Israeli television through the black and white footage of an aerial gun sight, or through the long shot of a distant urban landscape seconds before it is "pulverized" by a dropped bomb. The buildings crumble, flames shoot up, clouds of dust billow into the air. Another shot of arcade-game adrenalin.
The humanitarian stories exist but they do not concern Lebanon. Animal welfare societies plead on behalf of the dogs and cats left alone to face the rocket fire on deserted Kiryat Shemona, just as they did before for foxes and deer when "Israel" began building its mammoth walls of concrete and steel across their migration routes in the West Bank, walls that are also imprisoning, unseen, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
The rest of the coverage is dedicated to Israeli army spokespeople, including the national heartthrob Miri Regev, and media "commentators" and "analysts". Who are these people? They are from the same pool of former military intelligence and security service officers who once did this job in the closed rooms of army HQ but now wallow in the limelight. One favoured pundit is even subtitled "Expert on psychological warfare against Hassan Nasrallah".
And who are the presenters and anchors who interview them? The other day an ageing expert on Apache helicopters interrupted his interviewer irritatedly to tell him his question was stupid. "We were in the army together and both know the answer. Dont play dumb?" It was a rare reminder that these anchors too are just soldiers in suits. One of the most popular, Ehud Yaari of Channel 2, barely conceals his military credentials as he condones yet more violence against the Lebanese or, if he can be deflected for a moment, the people of Gaza.
That is what comes of having a "citizen army", where teenagers learn to use a gun before they can drive and men do reserve duty until their late 40s. It means every male teacher, professor, psychologist and journalist thinks as a soldier because that is what he has been for most of his life.
"Israel" is not unique, far from it, though it is in a darker place, and has been for some time, than "we" in the West can fully appreciate. It is a mirror of what our own societies are capable of, despite our democratic values. It shows how a cult of victimhood makes one heartless and cruel, and how racism can be repackaged as civilised values.
Maybe those UN monitors, with their lookout post above the battlefield where "Israel" wants to use any means it can to destroy Hizbullah and Lebanese civilians who get in the way, had to be removed simply because they are a nuisance, a restraint when "Israel" needs to get on with the job of asserting "our" values. Maybe "Israel" does not want the scrutiny of peacekeepers as it fights our war on terror for us. Maybe it feared that the monitors reports might help to give back to the Lebanese, even to Hizbullah, their faces, their history, their suffering.
And, if we are honest, "Israel" is not alone. How many of us want the Arabs to remain faceless so we can keep believing we are the victims of a new ideology that wants only our evisceration, just as the "Red Indians" once supposedly wanted our scalps? How many many of us believe that our values demand that we fall in behind a new world order in which Arab deaths are not real deaths because "they" are not fully human?
And how many of us believe that deliberate barbarity, at least when we do it, is only "apparently" a crime against humanity?
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, "Israel". His book "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
Source:GlobalResearch.ca, 28-7-2006. Date: 29/07/2006 Time 22:25
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QANA MASSACRE ARTICLE
Editorials slam Israel over war crimes in Lebanon 31/07/2006 Robert Fisk:
'How can we stand by and allow this to go on?' Published: 31 July 2006 – The Independent.
They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. " Mehdi Hashem, aged seven Qana," was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy's body lay. "Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 Qana", "Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one Qana.'' And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas's little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father's shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses. You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the " pinpoint accuracy'' it claims, this was also a war crime. Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hezbollah from the south Lebanese town of Qana as if that justified this massacre. Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about "Muslim terror" threatening " western civilization" as if the Hezbollah had killed all these poor people. And in Qana, of all places. For only 10 years ago, this was the scene of another Israeli massacre, the slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees by an Israeli artillery battery as they sheltered in a UN base in the town. More than half of those 106 were children. Israel later said it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft over the scene of that killing a statement that turned out to be untrue when The Independent discovered videotape showing just such an aircraft over the burning camp. It is as if Qana whose inhabitants claim that this was the village in which Jesus turned water into wine has been damned by the world, doomed forever to receive tragedy. And there was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: "For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B". No doubt the manufacturers can call it "combat-proven" because it destroyed the entire three-storey house in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of them died. --- "Qana mssacre 2" brings back flashbacks of Israel's bloody history Summary: By Omar Halabi-BEIRUT Israel's blood-stained history against humanity got even bloodier Sunday morning after the world woke up to a second Qana massacre in which at least 40 Lebanese civilians were killed, the majority of whom were children.
The annihilation of the entire village of Qana in South Lebanon on the 19th day of Israel's aggression on the country brought back memories of the first Qana massacre of 1996 in which Israel slaughtered 101 unarmed civilians who had taken refuge in a UN peacekeeping forces base in the village. Relief workers have so far recovered 30 bodies from under the rubble of the building that was leveled to the ground by Israeli air strikes at dawn today. Workers are still trying to pull out the bodies trapped beneath the concrete and a final death toll is unavailable yet, Lebanese police sources said..
Lebanon's Foreign Minister Fawzi Saloukh denounced the bloody massacre saying it is part of Israel's barbaric aggression against Lebanon.
In a press statement, he condemned the "cowardly crime committed by the Israeli enemy against innocent children and elderly women." He called on the UN Security Council and "all those who believe in humanity to take a look at this barbaric act" and asserted that Lebanon will not be silenced on such issues.
Lebanon will submit an official complaint to the Security Council, which, for its part must study such criminal acts, he said.
The main goal now is to reach a ceasefire and then discuss pending issues between the two sides, he said.
These issues include "liberating Shabaa Farms and Kfar Shuba Hills from Israel, handing over landmine maps kept by Israel after its withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in 2000, and an Israeli pledge to stop its violations against Lebanon." He asserted Lebanon's will to start negotiations and to discuss all pertaining issues after reaching ceasefire.
Lebanon "is still a strong united country and if Israel believes that with such crimes" it could divide the Lebanese people "then it is deluded," he said.
For his part, the head of the Democratic Gathering parliamentary bloc Walid Junblatt said the massacre committed by Israel earlier today in Qana in which dozens of children and women were killed and also another massacre in 1996 in the same town "is ample proof of (Israel's) historical spite against the Arab citizen".
Israelis "do not accept defeat and they do not recognize their final withdrawal from Lebanon" he said. "The Israeli army reached an incapacitated state militarily where it has not made any achievements on that level since it started its aggression on the 12th of this month," he added.
Israel's "deep rooted hate against the Arabs is rising and is being acted upon as massacres ... this only increases the Lebanese and Arabs' faith in their cause and their determination to resist," he said.
Local media sources said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who was expected to visit Beirut today has canceled her trip.
The Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Al-Siniora and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri has stated earlier today that they will not hold negotiations before an immediate and unconditional ceasefire and the opening of an investigation into the Israeli massacre in Qana. Source:KUNA. Date: 30/07/2006 Time 15:01
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ZIONESTS DIGGING THEIR OWN GRAVE
Zionists digging their own grave in Lebanon Summary: The Zionist regime’s brutal attacks on Lebanon have entered their third week as the world witnesses Lebanon’s brave Islamic resistance with astonishment.
Although unbiased international analysts and observers believe that this war was inevitable because the United States has been seeking an opportunity to implement its Middle East Initiative and the Zionists have been pursuing their Nile to the Euphrates strategy, such a show of resistance by Hezbollah forces was quite unimaginable. Israel thought that the war would have an outcome similar to the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, which ended with the Arabs agreeing to make concessions to the Zionist regime. The Zionists also believed that by occupying an extensive part of southern Lebanon through ground attacks and destroying the country’s infrastructure through air raids in a maximum of seven days, they would be able to turn the Lebanese people against Hezbollah and force Lebanese officials to negotiate the disarmament of the guerilla group.
However, with the prolongation of the war, Israel’s hopes have been frustrated. Facing a situation it had not predicted, Israel is about to become the main loser of the war.
The following can be cited as proof:
(1) The Israeli public’s opposition to a prolonged war :
The Israelis cannot bear a prolonged war and continued fighting could give rise to an anti-government Israeli uprising, signs of which have already emerged in minor incidents.
After Hezbollah missiles targeted the important port city of Haifa, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the country’s media that the Israeli people and army would support operations against Lebanon and Hezbollah.
But Olmert lied to himself and to the people, since he is well aware that Israeli Jews cannot tolerate a prolonged war. Israeli troops are also harassed by the constant guerilla operations of Hezbollah forces and tremble at the thought of engaging the Islamic resistance in battle.
On the other side are the martyrdom-seeking forces of Hezbollah and the Lebanese people, who are continuing their normal lives despite Israel’s incessant air raids and missile attacks on the country. It seems that they feel prepared to face months of military operations.
(2) Military power:
The Zionist regime has used many types of high-tech weapons and U.S.-imported laser bombs to target almost every spot in Lebanon it considers strategic and important. However, it has failed to reach its goals.
According to Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah has only used half of its military power so far. Therefore, the Israeli general public and Zionist officials are very worried about the possibility of more intense missile attacks by Hezbollah on the occupied territories, particularly Tel Aviv.
(3) Growing animosity toward the Zionist regime:
As acknowledged by Zionist media outlets, the wave of hatred of and disgust with Israel for its barbaric bombardment of residential areas and its massacres of innocent Lebanese women and children is growing. Israel’s Haaretz daily recently published an article saying that the cost of the war is increasing day by day and that international animosity toward the Zionist regime has grown, a factor that will negatively impact national security.
Elsewhere in the article, the daily pointed out that, contrary to the false belief in Israel that the Zionist regime enjoys the support of the international community, the images of war in Beirut will inflict serious damage on Israel, increasing hatred of the occupier regime not only in the East but also in the Western world.
On the other hand, the popularity of Hezbollah, and particularly Nasrallah, among Arab nations and some European countries is increasing day by day, to the extent that he is even being called “the hero of the resistance”.
Many Arab politicians, particularly Sunni clerics, also admit that no one in the Arab world has ever shown such resistance against aggressors and bullying powers. Source:Tehran Times. Date: 29/07/2006 Time 01:00 --- Kiryat Shmona residents 'scared to death' to return to their homes By Eli Ashkenazi
Tuesday morning 25 "guests" are due to check out of the Orchid Hotel in Eilat and take buses back to Kiryat Shmona, the town that has been targeted by the heaviest rocket volleys since the fighting in the north began.
Last Wednesday some 1,000 Kiryat Shmona residents left for hotels in Eilat. On Sunday they reluctantly returned home.
People sat outside the hotels and wept, says Rinat Barda, of Kiryat Shmona.
Gila, who returned north with her two children, said she was "scared to death. They should have looked after us. Where are going back to? There are rockets falling there. We support the prime minister and the war, but he must look after us."
Barda, her husband and two children are in the Orchid Hotel. She says the manager, Benny Biton, extended their stay by two days, until Tuesday. "There's no way I'm leaving here, I'm not going back to Kiryat Shmona. I have a 6-year-old who is wetting his bed again. My friends back home just told me of another rocket landing, another siren. I'm ashamed to be begging the hotel manager to let us stay here," she says.
Yigal Buzaglo, a Kiryat Shmona councillor, said "all the residents should be evacuated. This is no way to live. I'm calling on the prime minister to help us. If the government can't, I urge Arkady Gaydamak to do it."
Haim Barbibai, Kiryat Shmona mayor, said it would be impossible to evacuate everyone. "If Kiryat Shmona is evacuated, they will bomb Safed and so on. In the next few days we will take other people out in turn," he says.
Some of residents who returned north on Sunday planned to stop the buses en route and refuse to continue. Others were going to go to the Knesset. But exhaustion and despair made them cancel their plans.
Sima Batash, who remained in Eilat, says "It ripped my heart when they went back. There was a woman with a new baby who was devastated, she wanted to die. I tried to calm her down. I called the Home Front Command, the Defense (War) Ministry, the Prime Minister's Office, Kiryat Shmona municipality. Nobody had answers for us. We're returning to an impossible situation.
"My house, my mother's and sister's houses were hit by rockets. Kiryat Shmona is in ruins. A state is measured in times of plight, and this time it failed. Like they took the trouble to distribute flyers in Lebanon (calling on people to evacuate before bombing), they should find a solution to our plight. We are the people living in the front, being fired by rockets all the time."
"I support the war, we must have quiet in the north," says Barda. "But the residents (settlers) cannot be deserted. They should have thought of that when they went to war."
Source:Haaretz, 8-8-2006. Date: 08/08/2006 Time 10:47
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ISRAELI TERRORISM
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2535310_1,00.html The Sunday Times – World January 07, 2007 Revealed: Israel plans nuclear strike on IranUzi Mahnaimi, New York and Sarah Baxter, Washington ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources. The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb. Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open “tunnels” into the targets. “Mini-nukes” would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout. “As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished,” said one of the sources. The plans, disclosed to The Sunday Times last week, have been prompted in part by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad’s assessment that Iran is on the verge of producing enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons within two years. Israeli military commanders believe conventional strikes may no longer be enough to annihilate increasingly well-defended enrichment facilities. Several have been built beneath at least 70ft of concrete and rock. However, the nuclear-tipped bunker-busters would be used only if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene, senior sources said. Israeli and American officials have met several times to consider military action. Military analysts said the disclosure of the plans could be intended to put pressure on Tehran to halt enrichment, cajole America into action or soften up world opinion in advance of an Israeli attack. Some analysts warned that Iranian retaliation for such a strike could range from disruption of oil supplies to the West to terrorist attacks against Jewish targets around the world. Israel has identified three prime targets south of Tehran which are believed to be involved in Iran’s nuclear programme: · Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges are being installed for uranium enrichment · A uranium conversion facility near Isfahan where, according to a statement by an Iranian vice-president last week, 250 tons of gas for the enrichment process have been stored in tunnels · A heavy water reactor at Arak, which may in future produce enough plutonium for a bomb Israeli officials believe that destroying all three sites would delay Iran’s nuclear programme indefinitely and prevent them from having to live in fear of a “second Holocaust”. The Israeli government has warned repeatedly that it will never allow nuclear weapons to be made in Iran, whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has declared that “Israel must be wiped off the map”. Robert Gates, the new US defence secretary, has described military action against Iran as a “last resort”, leading Israeli officials to conclude that it will be left to them to strike. Israeli pilots have flown to Gibraltar in recent weeks to train for the 2,000-mile round trip to the Iranian targets. Three possible routes have been mapped out, including one over Turkey. Air force squadrons based at Hatzerim in the Negev desert and Tel Nof, south of Tel Aviv, have trained to use Israel’s tactical nuclear weapons on the mission. The preparations have been overseen by Major General Eliezer Shkedi, commander of the Israeli air force. Sources close to the Pentagon said the United States was highly unlikely to give approval for tactical nuclear weapons to be used. One source said Israel would have to seek approval “after the event”, as it did when it crippled Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak with airstrikes in 1981. Scientists have calculated that although contamination from the bunker-busters could be limited, tons of radioactive uranium compounds would be released. The Israelis believe that Iran’s retaliation would be constrained by fear of a second strike if it were to launch its Shehab-3 ballistic missiles at Israel. However, American experts warned of repercussions, including widespread protests that could destabilise parts of the Islamic world friendly to the West. Colonel Sam Gardiner, a Pentagon adviser, said Iran could try to close the Strait of Hormuz, the route for 20% of the world’s oil. Some sources in Washington said they doubted if Israel would have the nerve to attack Iran. However, Dr Ephraim Sneh, the deputy Israeli defence minister, said last month: “The time is approaching when Israel and the international community will have to decide whether to take military action against Iran.”
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