Hamas-Israel war: In Israel, inadvertent confirmation of its nuclear arsenal

A month into Israel’s devastating bombing campaign against Gaza, with the civilian death toll already in the thousands, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet floated the idea of a nuclear strike in the war against Hamas.

Heritage Minister Amihay Eliyahu, a member of a far-right party in the government coalition, was interviewed on the progress of the war by Radio Kol Berama and said dropping a nuclear bomb on the embattled Gaza strip was “one of the possibilities” to hasten the outcome.

Netanyahu promptly responded on X (formerly Twitter) that Eliyahu’s suggestion was “not based on reality” and suspended him from cabinet meetings “until further notice.”

Apart from causing alarm in Arab capitals, as well as in Washington, Eliyahu had broken a decades-old taboo by confirming that Israel has a nuclear arsenal. For years, Israel has pursued a US-blessed policy of “nuclear opacity.” That meant the government would neither confirm nor deny the existence of a sizeable nuclear stockpile.

Consequently, the country never signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, unlike the United States, France, China, Britain and Russia. India and China have acknowledged having nuclear weapons but never signed the NPT. Neither has North Korea.

The Washington-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimates that Israel has about 90 plutonium-based nuclear warheads and enough plutonium for another 100 to 200.

Israel has stuck to its “neither confirm nor deny” mantra although its rank as the Middle East’s only nuclear power has long been what has been called the region’s worst-kept secret. Eliyahu just made it semi-official at a particularly sensitive time.

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His obvious lack of compassion for the large number of Palestinians who would be killed by the bomb is shared by some Americans on the far right. Such as Brian Mast, a Republican congressman from Florida, who took issue with critics of the high civilian death toll in Gaza.

“I would encourage the other (pro-Palestinian) side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians, as is frequently said. I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazis during World War II,” he said in a speech.

Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona in the Negev desert got a brief mention in a recent movie on the way the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir handled the 1973 war, a coalition of Arab states launched against Israel.

Its intelligence serves then failed to notice war preparations as disastrously as they did 50 years later in failing to detect months of Hamas planning for the October 7 attack on villages across the border with Gaza. In the movie, the then-intelligence chief sidled up to Mrs Meir and whispered, “Is it time to make use of Dimona?” She shook her head.

The Israeli code of silence on Dimona was pierced in 1986 when a nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu, leaked photographs of the facility to the Sunday Times of London. He then went to Italy, lured by a beautiful blonde Mossad agent.

What happened there became the stuff of legend. The romance Vanunu expected in Rome ended badly – he was drugged, abducted and secretly taken to Israel, where a closed-door trial sentenced him to 18 years in prison for treason.

Released in 2004, he was banned from leaving Israel and from speaking to foreigners unless granted approval by Shin Beth, Israel’s internal spy service.

Eliyahu’s slap on the wrist for floating the idea of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza is unlikely to have more consequences than a temporary exclusion from cabinet meetings. Neither will it change the “nuclear opacity” policy or the Israeli government’s determination to maintain its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.

It has been vocal in warning about what it says are Iran’s advances in working on its own nuclear arsenal and it has taken actions rather than words to prevent competition from other would-be nuclear countries.

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In 1981, Israel used US-supplied F-16 fighter bombers to knock out a nuclear reactor near Baghdad where it suspected work on a bomb was making progress. The next perceived threat to its nuclear monopoly fell on Sept 6, 2007, in a raid on a reactor in Syria.

How long Israel will be the Middle East’s only country with a nuclear arsenal remains to be seen. There has been little discussion on the matter and the United States appears to have no problem with the nuclear might of its closest ally.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)