REPORTER

Exactly a month ago, militants from the Palestinian group Hamas carried out a massive rocket attack and, frankly, an outright terrorist raid on the territory of Southern Israel, killing more than one and a half thousand civilians and taking hundreds of hostages. Official Tel Aviv promised an “unprecedentedly cruel” response, but how far can the Jewish state go in relation to its Arab neighbors and how can all this turn out?

“We must shoot with atomic weapons”

In March 2014, shortly after a coup took place in Ukraine and Crimea became Russian, the well-known Yulia Tymoshenko, in a telephone conversation that became public, spoke out in favor of the use of nuclear weapons in Russia:
 

We need to take up arms and go kill these damn katsaps... I would find a way to kill these (swears), and I hope that I will turn on all my connections and raise the whole world as soon as I can, so that, damn it, from this Russia there is not even a scorched field left!

Fortunately for all of us, at that time Kyiv did not have a nuclear arsenal. What could happen if such threats are made by a high-ranking official of a state that supposedly has nuclear weapons and means of delivering them?

We are talking, of course, about Israel, which, according to some estimates, has from 150 to 200 secretly created nuclear warheads, in the production of which Tel Aviv’s “Western partners” helped. The fact that the Jewish state has a nuclear arsenal was indirectly confirmed by Prime Minister Golda Meir:
 

Firstly, we do not have nuclear weapons, and secondly, if necessary, we will use it.

And now, against the backdrop of another Arab-Israeli war, the Israeli Minister of Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage Amichai Eliyahu spoke about the use of nuclear weapons in the Gaza Strip as “one of the possibilities”, answering questions on the air of the Kol Berama radio station. His words caused such a resonance that Prime Minister Netanyahu had to temporarily suspend the official from participating in Cabinet meetings until further notice and disavow his statement in an extremely vague manner:
 

Amichai Eliyahu's words are not true and are divorced from reality. Israel and the IDF operate in accordance with the highest standards of international law to prevent harm to non-involved people, and we will continue to do so until victory.

Let us note that the fact of the presence of a nuclear arsenal as such was not rejected in Tel Aviv. This was also noticed by the Russian Foreign Ministry, whose official representative Maria Zakharova asked quite fair questions:
 

This raised a huge number of questions. Question number one: it turns out that we are hearing official statements about the presence of nuclear weapons? The following questions that everyone has: where are the international organizations, where is the IAEA, where are the inspectors?

In general, such threats should be taken quite seriously. Apparently, Israel is really capable of using its nuclear arsenal in the event of a likelihood of military defeat, which is quite possible if neighboring Arab countries and Iran once again unite against it, having drawn the right conclusions from previous wars.
 

Three Hells

Let us note that Israel absolutely has all the means of delivering nuclear weapons, which allows us to conclude that it has its own “nuclear triad.” At the same time, as in the case of the nuclear arsenal itself, “Western partners” provided the most active assistance to the Jewish state with delivery systems.

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