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Jerusalem: Israel said Sunday that a report in The Sunday Times that the Jewish state had drawn up plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities in a tactical nuclear strike was “incorrect.” The story is “incorrect,” foreign ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. “Israel is 100 percent behind the international community's efforts to bring about an end to Iran's nuclear program. Israel totally supports Resolution 1737 and the international community must be ready to take even tougher measures against Iran,” he said.
Earlier Immigrant Absorption Minister Zeev Boim dismissed the report in the British newspaper — which in 1986 first exposed Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal — as “rumors.”
He told reporters before Sunday's weekly cabinet meeting that “it's better for Israel to remain in the backlines and support international efforts to prevent Iran's nuclear program.”
And a senior Israeli official dismissed the report as “absurd.”
“This is absurd information coming from a newspaper that has already in the past distinguished itself with sensationalist headlines that in the end amounted to nothing,” the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
“To think that we will launch an atomic attack against Iran, and on top of that that we would reveal it in advance to a foreign newspaper is doubly ridiculous,” he said.
“The Israeli policy on this dossier, recommended by former prime minister Ariel Sharon and followed by his successor Ehud Olmert, has not changed and Israel is not planning to attack Iran militarily,” he said.
“The solution that we recommend, along with the international community, is that of sanctions imposed on Iran.”
Quoting several Israeli military sources, the Sunday Times said that Israel has drawn up plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities in a tactical nuclear strike using low-yield “bunker busting” bombs.
It quoted the sources as saying that two of the Jewish state's air force squadrons are training to use the weapons for a single strike.
The plan is similar to one said in a report in the New Yorker magazine last April to have been considered by the United States. The White House dismissed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh's article as “ill-informed”.
Iran, which has defied UN Security Council demands to halt uranium enrichment, says its nuclear program is meant for civilian purposes only.
But Israel, widely considered the Middle East's sole if undeclared nuclear power, suspects — together with the West — that the Islamic republic's real aim is to develop a nuclear arsenal that would dramatically tip the balance of power in the region.
