Posted on 10/30/2003 10:44:04 AM PST by yonif
Palestinian terror organizations have the ability to carry out a chemical attack in Israel, but have refrained from doing so to date due to the repercussions of such an attack, a senior Israeli security official said this week.
"It is not a problem for terror organizations to attain chemical materials, and they are aware of the advantages of such an attack, but on the other hand [they know] it would be considered breaking all the rules of the game," the official said at a briefing.
He noted that such an attack could kill hundreds or thousands of people, as opposed to the dozen or so people killed in conventional Palestinian suicide bombings.
Chemical materials are readily available at scores of factories across the country, he said, including at the seemingly innocuous Tnuva milk factory in Jerusalem.
The security officials' comments come just days before police's annual major security drill, scheduled for Tuesday at Ramat Gan stadium, where this year's scenario will be how security officials cope with a chemical attack on a school.
Traces of pesticides, rat poisoning, and other toxic chemicals have been found at the sites of more than five Palestinian bombings since the late 1990s, police spokesman Gil Kleiman said Thursday.
One such incident was uncovered at the site of the double suicide bombing in downtown Jerusalem in December 2001, in which 11 people were killed, and 175 others wounded.
Nails and bolts packed into explosives used in the car bombing in that late-night attack had been dipped in rat poison. No one was affected by the chemical, however, since the small amount of toxicity inside the bomb broke down as a result of the explosion.
Police said that it appeared that the toxins used in that attack had been deliberately added to enhance the bombs' lethality, but did not rule out the possibility that the explosives used had been transported in containers which had previously contained chemical substances.
During the last three years of Palestinian violence, there have been more than 100 suicide bombings across the country, attacks which have killed almost five hundred people.
Indeed, the police spokesman said that the most immediate concern to date remains injury caused by shrapnel in such bombings, but said security officials are preparing for far more-deadly attacks.
"We know that terror organizations are constantly looking for more efficient ways to kill people," he said.
I say Israel needs to stop looking at this as a tit for tat game. Hit em hard before they get a chance to use such weapons. It's time for a winner and a loser in this game.
They can very easily make a biological weapon. Just infect a suicide bomber with the AIDS virus, Hepatitis or any other contagion which can be transmitted via blood.
They refrain because Arafat tells them too, not because Arafat has a soft spot, but because Israel is a small place and a chembiorad weapon is likely to kill as many Palestinians as Jews, including one Yasser Arafat.
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