Israel-Hamas war: MP says nuking Gaza an option, how many nuclear weapons does Israel have?

“That’s one way,” Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said during an interview on Radio Kol Berama on Sunday.

The interviewer had asked, “Your expectation is that tomorrow morning we’d drop what amounts to some kind a nuclear bomb on all of Gaza, flattening them, eliminating everybody there?”

When it was pointed out there were still some 240 hostages being held by Hamas, Mr Eliyahu doubled down, saying while he prayed for their return “there is a price to be paid in war”.

“Why are the lives of the abductees, whose release I really want, more important than the lives of the soldiers and the people who will be murdered later?” he said.

The comments, which made headlines in Arab and Israeli media, were quickly disavowed by Mr Netanyahu, who immediately suspended Mr Eliyahu from cabinet meetings.

“Amichai Eliyahu’s words are detached from reality,” the PM said in a statement. “Israel and the IDF are acting in accordance with the highest standards of international law in order to prevent harm to uninvolved people, and we will continue to do that all the way to victory.”

Mr Eliyahu is a member of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, and does not have any connection to the three-member war cabinet overseeing the operation against Hamas, The Times of Israel reports.

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid and National Unity leader Minister Benny Gantz both condemned Mr Eliyahu for the “horrifying” and “irresponsible” comments, which Mr Eliyahu has since tried to walk back.

“It is clear to all sensible people that the statement about the atom is metaphorical,” he wrote on X.

“However, a strong and disproportionate response to terrorism is definitely required, which will clarify to the Nazis and their supporters that terrorism is not worthwhile. This is the only formula that democratic states can use to deal with terrorism. At the same time, it is clear that the State of Israel is committed to doing everything possible to return the hostages safe and sound.”

Israel’s nukes

Fears that the war between Israel and Hamas could spiral into a wider regional conflict have again raised the spectre of nuclear weapons — and Israel’s own “worst kept secret”.

Israel is widely believed to have around 80 to 90 plutonium-based nuclear warheads, and enough material for more than 200, making it one of only nine nuclear-armed countries alongside Russia, the US, China, France, the UK, Pakistan, India and North Korea.

The arsenal consists of an estimated 30 gravity bombs for delivery by aircraft, with the remainder of the warheads for delivery by missiles.

The Jericho II medium-range ballistic missile and Jericho III intermediate-range ballistic missile “are believed to be based with their mobile launchers in caves at a military base east of Jerusalem”, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute says.

According to Professor Clive Williams from the ANU’s Centre for Military and Security Law and Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, the Jericho II has an estimated range of 1500 to 1800 kilometres, while the Jericho III can reach more than 4000 kilometres.

Israel also operates a fleet of around half a dozen Dolphin-class diesel-electric submarines out of the northern port city of Haifa.

A number of the German-built submarines are commonly thought to have been adapted to carry cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads to maintain a second-strike option.

“An estimated 30-40 nuclear weapons have been allocated to the submarines, with a possible missile delivery range of up to 1500 kilometres,” Prof Williams writes.

While never openly acknowledging its capability, Israel has issued veiled threats in the past.

“Our submarine fleet is used first and foremost to deter our enemies who strive to extinguish us,” Mr Netanyahu said in 2016. “They must know that Israel is capable of hitting back hard against anyone who seeks to hurt us.”

‘Nuclear ambiguity’

Officially, Israel refuses to confirm or deny its secret nuclear weapons program, and is not party to the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The policy, known as “nuclear ambiguity” or “nuclear opacity”, dates back more than five decades to a 1969 Oval Office meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and US President Richard Nixon, after nearly a decade of tension between the two countries over the issue.

The two leaders reached an unwritten agreement that effectively amounted to “don’t ask, don’t tell” — Israel would agree not to declare, test or threaten to use nuclear weapons, and the US would not pressure Israel to sign the NPT, which had been co-sponsored and signed by the US the previous year.

Despite this, Israel is suspected to have carried out an illegal nuclear test in 1979, roughly halfway between South Africa and Antarctica — an incident quickly swept under the rug by the Carter White House.

Israel began developing its nuclear program in the 1950s and is believed to have produced its first nuclear weapon in the late ‘60s.

The US government had first caught wind of Israel’s secret nuclear reactor — located in the Negev desert near the city of Dimona and built with the assistance of the French — in 1960.

The Americans, fearful of a Middle East arms race, for several years put pressure on the Israelis to inspect Dimona, with Israel going so far as to build a fake control centre at the plant to mask its true purpose.

“The Israelis, who are one of the few peoples whose survival is genuinely threatened, are probably more likely than almost any other country to actually use their nuclear weapons,” national security adviser Henry Kissinger told President Nixon in a declassified 1969 memo.

“This is one program on which the Israelis have persistently deceived us and may even have stolen from us.”

Secret letter

After the Oval Office meeting, “US policy toward Israeli nuclear weapons was indeed eased … but judging by Nixon’s memoirs, it was because he didn’t care much whether Israel had them”, former commissioner of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Victor Gilinsky wrote for Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this year.

“His main interest was to gain Israeli support in the Cold War,” he said.

“As to maintaining secrecy, they didn’t need a formal agreement. Nixon and Meir both understood a declared Israeli nuclear arsenal would have led to pressure on Moscow to provide their Arab allies with nuclear weapons.”

Successive US presidents honoured this unwritten agreement until it was formalised into a secret letter during the Clinton administration.

According to a 2018 report in The New Yorker, the letter — first signed by President Bill Clinton and known only to a handful of senior officials — amounted to an American pledge not to pressure Israel to give up its nuclear weapons as long as it continued to face existential threats in the region.

“In the letter, according to former officials, President Bill Clinton assured the Jewish state that no future American arms-control initiative would ‘detract’ from Israel’s ‘deterrent’ capabilities, an oblique but clear reference to its nuclear arsenal,” investigative journalist Adam Entous wrote.

“Later, Israeli officials inserted language to make clear to Washington that Israel would ‘defend itself, by itself’, and that it would, therefore, not consider the American nuclear arsenal to be a substitute for Israeli nuclear arms.”

Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump each signed updated versions of the letter.

Vanunu scandal

The existence of Israel’s nuclear program was only revealed to the general public in 1986 when UK newspaper The Sunday Times published a bombshell story featuring whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, a former Dimona technician.

Vanunu provided the paper with details and photos of the inner workings of the nuclear plant.

“Based on his revelations, some experts estimated that Israel had built between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons of varying yields and complexity,” writes the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

The Morocco-born nuclear technician lived in Australia briefly in 1986, where he converted to Christianity from Judaism. In September that year, he flew to London to tell his story to the media.

But he was soon lured out of the UK by a female Mossad agent posing as an American tourist in a honey trap operation. She convinced him to fly to Rome, where he was drugged and abducted.

Vanunu was flown back to Israel, where he was convicted of treason in a secret trial, spending 18 years behind bars. He was released in 2004 but was banned from travel or contact with foreigners without prior permission.

Widely despised as a traitor in Israel, Vanunu was disavowed by most of his family, Reuters reported upon his release.

But he has also been celebrated as a hero by the global anti-nuclear movement and repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

“I’ve never known of a case where someone has been nominated for the Nobel Prize and convicted of treason at the same time,” Professor Richard Falk, an international law expert from Princeton University, told The Guardian after Vanunu’s sentencing in 1988.

‘Doomsday weapon’

In the wake of the October 7 terror attacks by Hamas, which left 1400 Israelis dead and more than 240 taken hostage, fears have grown that any widening of the conflict could involve nuclear weapons.

As of November 5, the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza claims around 9800 people have been killed in Israel’s subsequent attacks, mostly civilians. Those figures have not been independently verified.

Mr Eliyahu is not the first Israeli politician to suggest using “doomsday” weapons against the Palestinian terror group.

“Jericho missile! Jericho missile! A strategic alert, before we consider introducing our forces. A doomsday weapon!” Revital Gotliv wrote in a post on X two days after the attacks. “This is my opinion. May God preserve all our strength.”

Ms Gotliv, a member of Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party with a history of making inflammatory comments, wrote in a follow-up post that Israel should show no mercy in battling Hamas.

“Only an explosion that shakes the Middle East will restore this country’s dignity, strength, and security! It’s time to kiss doomsday,” she said.

“Shooting powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighbourhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza. Otherwise, we would have done nothing. Not with passwords, with penetrating bombs. Without mercy! Without mercy!”

The post was tagged with a disclaimer by the social media platform that its visibility had been limited as it “may violate X’s rules against Violent Speech”, Insider reported.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), warned last month that “Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons significantly increases the risks associated with the conflict and contributes to regional tensions”.

“Escalation is a real danger,” a spokeswoman told The South China Morning Post.

frank.chung@news.com.au