Peres: Israeli Attack on Iran Growing More Likely

Cyprus President Demetris Christofias (R) speaks to Israel`s President Shimon Peres (L) at the Presidential Palace, Nicosia, Cyprus, 03 November 2011. EPA/BGNES

Israeli President Shimon Peres warned late Saturday an attack on Iran and its nuclear program was growing "more and more likely."

Peres’s warning comes several days before a report by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, on Iran's nuclear program, and after numerous recent reports that Israel, the USA, and the UK were mulling using the military option to set back the Iranian nuclear efforts.

"The intelligence services of the different countries that are keeping an eye on (Iran) are worried and putting pressure on their leaders to warn that Iran is ready to obtain the nuclear weapon. We must turn to these countries to ensure that they keep their commitments ... this must be done, and there is a long list of options," Peres declared on a private Israeli TV channel, as cited by international media.

On Wednesday, Haaretz newspaper reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak were seeking to win cabinet support for a strike on Iran, which Israel and the West suspect is looking to build an atomic bomb.

Previous IAEA assessments have centred on Iran's efforts to produce fissile material -- uranium and plutonium - that can be for power generation and other peaceful uses, and also in a nuclear bomb.

Iran denies has insisted its nuclear program is for power generation and medical purposes only to which the country is entitled to under the NPT, which forms the core of the international nuclear non-proliferation regime.

Israeli forces have already carried out preventive strikes against the nuclear facilities of other Middle Eastern nations – against the Osirak reactor in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1981 (Operation Babylon) and against a Syrian nuclear site in 2007 (Operation Orchard), effectively destroying the nuclear programs of Iraq and Syria.

Iran’s nuclear facilities, however, would be a much harder target for Israel because of the greater distance, mountainous terrain, and the fact that they are underground and spread around the country, which makes it doubtful that if acting alone without US involvement Israel could really set back the Iranian nuclear program.

The international repercussions of a potential preventive strike carried out either by the USA or Israel remain unknown. Secret US diplomatic cables published in 2010 by WikiLeaks revealed that Iran’s Arab neighbors were growing especially worried by the Iranian nuclear program, and that they secretly backed a preventive strike.

Israel is especially concerned by the possibility of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, in the least because of the frequent rhetoric of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the Jewish State must be “wiped off the map.”

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