Israel engaged in covert war inside Iran: report

Israel is involved in a covert war of sabotage inside Iran to try to delay Tehran's alleged attempts to develop a nuclear weapon, a British newspaper said on Tuesday, quoting a former CIA agent and intelligence experts.

An intelligence source in the Middle East told Reuters last year Israel planned to target Iranian nuclear scientists with letter bombs and poisoned packages and had set off explosions in Iran. Analysts offered similar accounts and said such tactics would be credible, but no confirmation has been available.

Some analysts caution that reports of such a "dirty war" may form part of a psychological warfare campaign to unsettle Iran.

The intelligence source told Reuters that Israeli agents were working with Western governments and firms doing business with Tehran, whose Islamist leadership is a sworn enemy of Israel but denies accusations its nuclear program has a military purpose.

Israel's government, widely assumed to be the only nuclear power in the Middle East, declines all comment on such reports. More

ElBaradei: Ignoring Israel undermines NPT
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said Monday that Arab nations believe that Israel has undermined the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and this is a major obstacle to nuclear disarmament.

"What compounds the problem is that the nuclear non-proliferation regime has lost its legitimacy in the eyes of Arab public opinion because of the perceived double-standards concerning Israel, the only state in the region outside the NPT and known to possess nuclear weapons," he wrote in The Herald Tribune.

Israel is largely believed to posses the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East and has refused to sign the NPT or put its nuclear facilities under the UN supervision. More