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LONDON: To this day, Israel maintains a policy of deliberate ambiguity in regard to its nuclear capabilities, but it is a fact accepted by experts worldwide that Israel has had the bomb since just before the Six Day War in 1967.

And not just one bomb. Recent estimates by the independent Stockholm International Peace Institute, which has kept tabs on the world’s nuclear weapons and the states that possess them since 1966, suggest Israel has at least 90 nuclear warheads.

SIPRI believes that these warheads are capable of being delivered anywhere within a maximum radius of 4,500 km by its F-15, F-161, and F-35I “Adir” aircraft, its 50 land-based Jericho II and III missiles, and by about 20 Popeye Turbo cruise missiles, launched from submarines.

While Iran is a signatory to the international nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Israel is not, which begs the question: while Israel is wreaking havoc in Iran, with the declared aim of crippling a nuclear development program, which the International Atomic Energy Authority says is about energy, not weaponry, why is the international community not questioning Israel’s?

In March, during a meeting of the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Jassim Yacoub Al-Hammadi, Qatar’s ambassador to Austria, announced that Qatar was calling for “intensified international efforts” to bring all Israeli nuclear facilities “under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency and for Israel to join the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear state.”

Israel refuses to sign up to the NPT or cooperate with the IAEA. Furthermore, it is a little remembered fact that since 1981 Israel has been in breach of UN Resolution 487.

This was prompted by an attack on a nuclear research facility in Iraq by Israel on June 7, 1981, which was condemned by the UN Security Council as a “clear violation of the Charter of the UN and the norms of international conduct.”

Iraq, as the Security Council pointed out, had been a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty since it came into force in 1970.

Like all states, especially those developing, Iraq had the “inalienable sovereign right …  to establish programmes of technological and nuclear development to develop their economy and industry for peaceful purposes in accordance with their present and future needs and consistent with the internationally accepted objectives of preventing nuclear-weapons proliferation.”

The resolution, which remains in force, called on Israel “urgently to place its nuclear facilities under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency.”

Israel has never complied with Resolution 487.

That ambiguity extends to Israel’s only officially stated position on nuclear weapons, which it has repeated since the 1960s, that it “won’t be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.”

Israeli policymakers, SIPRI says, “have previously interpreted ‘introduce nuclear weapons’ as publicly declaring, testing or actually using the nuclear capability, which Israel says it has not yet done.”

In November 2023, about a month after the Hamas-led attack on Israel triggered the war in Gaza, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, a member of the ultra-nationalist Jewish Power party, said Israel should drop “some kind of atomic bomb” on Gaza, “to kill everyone.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly suspended Eliyahu from the cabinet. Eliyahu’s statements “were not based in reality,” Netanyahu said, while Eliyah himself took to X to say that it was “clear to all sensible people” that his statement was “metaphorical.”

Arsen Ostrovsky, an international human rights lawyer who on X describes himself as a “proud Zionist,” replied: “It is clear to all sensible people that you are a stupid idiot. Even if metaphorical, it was inexcusable. You need to know when to keep your mouth shut.”

Israel has no nuclear electricity generating plants, but it does have what experts agree is a vast nuclear facility.

The Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center — built in the late 1950s and early 1960s, allegedly with French assistance, and renamed for the former Israeli prime minister following his death in 2016 — is a heavily guarded complex in the Negev Desert barely 70 km from the border with Egypt.

Iran has ballistic missiles that are capable of reaching the Negev Nuclear Research Center, approximately 1,500 km from Tehran. Why is Tehran hitting Israeli cities in retaliation to Israel’s attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear industry, when it could attack Israel’s nuclear facility?

The answer, most likely, comes down to the “Samson Option.”

The Samson Option is a protocol for mutual destruction, the existence of which Israel has never admitted, but has never denied.

As Arab News reported in March, Israel is believed to have twice come close to using its nuclear weaponry.

In 2017, a claim emerged that on the eve of the Arab-Israeli war in 1967 Israel had been on the cusp of unleashing a “demonstration” nuclear blast designed to intimidate its enemies.

The plan was revealed in interviews with retired general Itzhak Yaakov, conducted by Avner Cohen, an Israeli-American historian and leading scholar of Israel’s nuclear history, and published only after Yaakov’s death.

In 2003, Cohen revealed that during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when it again appeared that Israeli forces were about to be overrun, then Prime Minister Golda Meir had authorized the use of nuclear bombs and missiles as a last-stand defense.

This doomsday plan, codenamed Samson, was named for the Israelite strongman who, captured by the Philistines, pulled down the pillars of their temple, destroying himself along with his enemies.

Mordecha Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician and peace activist, revealed Israel’s nuclear secrets back in 1986.

Ensnared in the UK by a female Israeli agent, Mordechai was lured to Rome, where he was kidnapped by Mossad agents and taken back to Israel on an Israeli navy ship.

Vanunu, charged with treason, was sentenced to 18 years in prison, much of which he spent in solitary confinement. Released in April 2004, he remains under a series of strictly enforced restrictions, which prevent him from leaving Israel or even speaking to any foreigner.

“We all believe that Israel has a nuclear capability,” Ahron Bregman, a senior teaching fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London’s Institute of Middle East Studies, told Arab News in March.

“The fact that Israel found it necessary to catch Vanunu and put him in jail, and continues to impose strict limitations on him, just proves that it has probably got it.”

The emergence of another Vanunu, especially in the current climate, is highly unlikely.

“Israelis are scared,” said Bregman, who served in the Israeli army for six years in the 1980s.

“Even if you believe it is a good idea to restrict Israel’s behavior and make sure it doesn’t do anything stupid, you are scared to act because you know they will abduct you and put you in jail.

“Israel is very tough on those who reveal its secrets.”