The Israeli government will consider ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention, President Shimon Peres has announced. It follows Syria’s decision to give up its chemical arsenal.
Israel, which has never publicly admitted to having chemical
weapons, remains one of only six countries in the world not to
have ratified the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans
the use or production of chemical weapons and requires
signatories to destroy their stockpiles over a period of time.
But now that the Syrian government is preparing to host experts
from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
(OPCW), who are to inspect the chemicals weapons arsenals stored
at several facilities in Syria, and supervise their destruction
over the next nine months, the Israelis say they may join the
treaty too.
“I am sure our government will consider it seriously,”
Peres told reporters Monday in The Hague, which is home to the
OPCW – the watchdog overseeing the convention.
The Israeli president added he believes Syria only joined the
convention when faced with the threat of military force, but
pledged that his government would nevertheless consider a call by
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for all countries to sign up to
the treaty.
Syria is believed to have spent decades building up its chemical
weapons program, and President Bashar Assad says that the biggest
regional threat to the country’s security is Israel’s military
power.
However, a recent report suggested that Israel too was stockpiling
chemical and biological weapons as part of its defense against a
possible attack from Arab neighbors.
A secret 1983 CIA intelligence estimate obtained by Foreign
Policy magazine describes “a probable [chemical weapon] nerve
agent production facility and a storage facility” located in
Israel’s Negev Desert, and states that “other CW production is
believed to exist within a well-developed Israeli chemical
industry.”
Among the chemicals that Israel might have possessed at the time
of the CIA report the “non-persistent agent” – identified
by FP as nerve gas sarin – is mentioned. As of late, the Western
countries have been blaming the Syrian government for using sarin
against its own people.
Earlier this month, Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz
said that Israel would be ready to discuss the issue of ratifying
the chemical weapons ban treaty when there was peace in the
Middle East.
Other than Israel, the countries that have not yet joined the
treaty include Myanmar, Egypt, Angola, North Korea and South
Sudan.