VIENNA - Arab diplomats signaled on Tuesday they would seek to step up pressure on Israel over its assumed nuclear arsenal but the Jewish state said any attempt to "bash" it would be counterproductive.
Arab countries, angry at the lack of movement in efforts to move towards a Middle East free of nuclear weapons, have served notice they plan to target Israel for criticism at the UN atomic agency's annual member state gathering in September.
"We need to raise our frustration, we need to raise our concern about this issue," one Arab envoy in Vienna, where the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is based, said.
Israel's ambassador to the IAEA, Ehud Azoulay, told Reuters that Arab states "are taking a counterproductive route by raising this issue ... and trying to bash Israel".
In a letter to IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano, posted on the UN agency's web site, 18 Arab member states asked for "Israeli nuclear capabilities" to be included as an agenda item of the Sept. 16-20 gathering in the Austrian capital.
The IAEA meeting "must take appropriate measures to ensure that Israel places all its nuclear installations under agency safeguards and accedes to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons," the letter, dated in June, said.
A senior Israeli government official on Tuesday said US President Barack Obama must stop being so naive on Egypt, and should avoid the same kind of failed policies Washington implemented during the last Egyptian revolution.
Like most Egyptians today, Israel largely blames Obama for facilitating the hijacking of the 2011 revolution by the Muslim Brotherhood.
It was Obama's "naivete" that led him to engage with the Muslim Brotherhood as former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was being ousted, the Israeli official told Israel Radio. And it was that American engagement that provided the Muslim Brotherhood with the legitimacy it needed to seize power.
The current situation in Egypt is likely to be protracted, as the Muslim Brotherhood is not expected to give up power without a fight. If the military is to maintain order and prevent a relapse to Islamist rule, it will need international support, and a continuation of American financial aid.
Israel is lobbying Washington to maintain aid to the Egyptian army, even though American law mandates freezing the transfer of funds if it is determined that a military coup has occurred.
[Food for thought: If Assad remains in power, he will owe a lot to Iran, who would have saved his regime. At that point he will even be more of a puppet to the Iranian regime and more likely than ever to do their bidding as far as Israel is concerned.]
Inside the People's Palace, in the hills overlooking the Syrian capital, visitors who have seen the Syrian president in the last month say security is surprisingly light for a man who has lost control of half his country to a rebel uprising.
Assad's air of confidence - a constant through more than two years of conflict - appeared almost delusional when rebel mortars and bombs were tearing at the heart of Damascus and fighting closed its airport to foreign airlines late last year.
But after weeks of counter-offensives by Assad's army in the south of the country - against rebel supply routes east of Damascus and most recently in the border town of Qusair - that optimism looks less irrational.
The fall last week of President Mohamed Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt prompted a defiant Assad to proclaim the defeat of political Islam. The Brotherhood's Syrian branch, already under pressure from more radical opposition groups, was dealt a psychological blow that comes on top of delays to promised supplies of weapons from Washington.
Congressional committees are holding up a plan to send U.S. arms to the rebels because they doubt the deliveries will be decisive in the war and they fear the weapons might end up in the hands of Islamist militants, U.S. national security sources have told Reuters.
Vitaly Churkin said Russian experts had been to the scene of an attack at Khan al-Assal near Aleppo and had gathered firsthand evidence.
Syria's government has refused to let a UN inspection team into the country, but this week invited UN officials for talks on launching an investigation.
Mr Churkin said the Russian inquiry had "established" that rebel forces had fired a Bashar 3 missile at the town, killing 26 people, including 16 troops.
"The results of the analysis clearly indicate that the ordinance used in Khan al-Assal was not industrially manufactured and was filled with sarin," Mr Churkin said.
"There is every reason to believe that it was the armed opposition fighters who used chemical weapons in Khan al-Assal."
[This one is worth watching closely]
Israel may drop its opposition to stationing Russian troops on the Golan Heights as members of the UN peacekeeping force there – if Moscow halts its shipments of S-300 missiles to Damascus. Such a deal could be in the works, the London-based Arabic-language a-Sharq al-Awsat said Wednesday.
In June, Russia expressed interest in stationing its troops on the Golan, where they would take the place of Austrian troops who had left their posts as fighting between rebels and Syrian Army troops rocked the UN base at Quneitra.
It is not clear why Russia is interested in stationing its troops on the Golan, but the a-Sharq al-Awsat report said that Justice Minister Tzipi Livni had met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in recent weeks, with the latter suggesting cancellation of the S-300 deal as a “gesture” to Israel for Jerusalem's agreement to allow Russian troops to take up posts at Quneitra.
The report did not say whether the proposal had been submitted to the UN for approval, or if there had been a final agreement on the matter.
The report did not say whether the proposal had been submitted to the UN for approval, or if there had been a final agreement on the matter.
Egypt's prosecutor ordered the arrest on Wednesday of the leaders of ousted President Mohamed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, charging them with inciting violence that saw 55 of their members shot dead.
A week after the army toppled Egypt's first democratically elected leader, the bloodshed on Monday has opened fissures in the Arab world's most populous country, with levels of bitterness unseen in its modern history.
Brotherhood spokesman Gehad El-Haddad said the announcement of charges against leader Mohamed Badie and several other senior figures was a bid by authorities to break up a vigil by thousands of Morsi supporters demanding his reinstatement.
The leaders were charged with inciting the violence which began before dawn, when the Brotherhood says its followers were fired on while peacefully praying. The army says terrorists provoked the shooting by attacking its troops.
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