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TEL AVIV, July 29: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said on Thursday Israel would only reconsider the need for its "deterrent capability" when there is peace across the Middle East and its neighbours abandon weapons of mass destruction.
Mr Sharon said the United States had made clear the Jewish state "is not to be touched when it comes to its deterrent capability". The undertaking was made as part of US endorsement of Israel's plan to withdraw from Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank next year, the prime minister said.
Billed as breaking a deadlock in an almost four-year-old conflict with the Palestinians, the "disengagement plan" is facing heavy opposition from Israeli rightists, including inside the Likud and government.
Israel refuses to admit or deny it has nuclear weapons under a policy of "strategic ambiguity", but international experts estimate it has an arsenal of 100 to 200 warheads, making it one of the biggest atomic powers.
Mr Sharon noted that Libya had agreed to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction and Iran had come under international pressure to come clean on its atomic programme.
"It could be that one day when we arrive at a comprehensive peace and everyone disarms completely, we will also be ready to consider taking steps," Mr Sharon told a meeting of his right-wing Likud party in Tel Aviv.
Mohammed ElBaradei, director of the UN watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency, said Mr Sharon had told him during a visit to Israel this month he could discuss ridding the region of nuclear arms but only as part of a broader peace process in the future.
However, this was the first time Ariel Sharon has made such a statement in public. Israel - unlike Iran - has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and therefore does not have to permit IAEA inspection of its facilities. This lack of international scrutiny is a source of anger for Iran and the Arabs.
The viability of Israel's "strategic ambiguity" has been in question since 1986, when Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at its atomic reactor in Dimona, discussed his work with a British newspaper. Jailed for 18 years, Vanunu was freed in April, vowing to campaign against Israel's assumed arsenal.
The Sunday Times interview, in which Vanunu gave details on plutonium processed at Dimona, was the first glimpse into an Israeli atomic programme underway since the 1950s.
BARRIER TO BE REROUTED: Israel will reroute its West Bank barrier closer to its boundary with the occupied territory under a court order that Palestinians must not be cut off from their lands, the project's administrator said on Thursday.
It was the first confirmation of leaks from security sources that the barrier, which the World Court and UN General Assembly have branded illegal and said should be dismantled, would in future run nearer to the "Green Line" frontier.
Senior political sources said the route revisions made by defence ministry planners would be presented to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon next week for final approval. Israel bills the barrier as its bulwark against infiltrating suicide bombers.
But previously planned or built sections snake well inside the West Bank to encompass large Jewish settlements Israel vows not to cede under any peace deal with Palestinians.
Palestinians condemn the network of razor-tipped fencing and concrete walls as a precursor to Israel annexing land it took in the 1967 war. They say this would deny them a viable state promised them by a US-backed "road map" peace plan.
In a precedent-setting decision on a Palestinian appeal last month, Israel's High Court ordered a 30-km section moved to ease hardship on Palestinians. But it also said Israel may erect a "security" barrier on land it considers "disputed".
"In the framework of the changes spurred by the High Court ruling, when the new maps are published they will show movement toward the Green Line, although not right on the Green Line," Netzah Mashiah, director of the Defence Ministry's barrier administration, said on Israel Radio.
Zigzagging portions of the barrier have separated thousands of Palestinians from farmland, hospitals, schools, markets and West Bank cities. This has raised an outcry abroad accusing Israel of ignoring human rights in charting the barrier.
Mashiah said the changes would leave the West Bank's largest settlement, Maaleh Adumim, a few kilometres east of Jerusalem and straddling the territory's mid-section, outside the barrier.
He said another settlement bloc, Gush Etzion, south of Jerusalem, would remain inside it. A third, Ariel, would be ringed with a local fence rather than taken in by a huge loop in the barrier that could have dissected much of the West Bank. -Reuters
