MIDEAST: Amid widening discussion - and a degree of panic - concerning the possibility of a cornered President Saddam Hussein striking at Israel, the Israeli government is making clear that it will hit back at Iraq if attacked, rather than absorbing missile strikes without response as it did in the Gulf War 11 years ago. And one analyst says Israel might resort to a retaliatory nuclear strike. David Horovitz reports from Jerusalem.
In Gaza's Rafah refugee camp yesterday, hundreds of Palestinians marched in support of Saddam, urging him to "bomb Tel Aviv". They burned Israeli and American flags and waved Palestinian and Iraqi flags. Saddam's popularity has been enhanced by the reported $30 million he has distributed to the families of Palestinians who have been killed in the 22-month intifada - $10,000 to relatives of those killed by Israeli forces; $25,000 to relatives of suicide bombers.
In 1991, Israel was persuaded by the US to sustain more than three dozen Iraqi Scud missile hits without retaliation, because of concerns that its involvement would lead to the unraveling of the US-Arab coalition against Saddam, said Mr Dore Gold, a key foreign policy adviser to the Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, yesterday. But this time, he went on, there was no US-Arab partnership against Iraq. And Israel had "both the capabilities, and perhaps even the freedom of action", he said, "to do what is necessary to defend its population". Speaking in similar vein, the Israeli Air Force chief, Maj-Gen Dan Halutz, remarked that, "You can't take what happened then and think that it will also happen this time - neither in the way the war will be conducted there nor in the manner of Israel's reaction." Israeli analysts are divided as to Saddam's capacity for hitting Israel with non-conventional weaponry.
The Scuds last time all carried conventional warheads, and caused only a single fatality. Mr Avihu Ben-Nun, a former Air Force commander, yesterday characterised Iraq's non-conventional capability as "very low". By contrast, Mr Ze'ev Schiff, an authoritative Israeli military analyst, wrote in the Ha'aretz daily that, "according to all the signs, Iraq now has biological weapons that could cause mass casualties" and noted that "military-grade biological weapons" were believed, potentially, to be "almost as lethal as a nuclear bomb". Quoting American intelligence assessments, Mr Schiff asserted that if Iraq attacked Israel and caused "massive casualties among the civilian population", Israel might order a "nuclear retaliation that would eradicate Iraq as a country".
Palestinian officials said Israeli tank fire yesterday killed a five-year-old Palestinian boy, Ayman Faris, in Khan Younis, north of Rafah. They said the fire, at a residential area, was unprovoked. The Israeli army said its troops had been fired on, and returned fire, and knew of no fatalities in the incident.