Israeli intelligence officials have told their US counterparts that Iran is moving quickly to develop ways of putting chemical weapons on missiles, or smuggling them into Israel or another country, according to the Jerusalem Post, which cites a New York Times report from 3 November. Israeli officials reportedly presented the chemical threat as more urgent than Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
The warning has been received unevenly in Washington. Some senior US officials are said to have taken it seriously, while others are deeply sceptical, and some compared it with the flawed assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002. Critics quoted in the report see it as part of a push by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government to draw the United States back into large-scale fighting with Iran. Israel also shared the assessments with Gulf states without supporting evidence, and Gulf governments reportedly did not take the claims seriously.
US intelligence is said to broadly agree that Iran is developing chemical weapons. The disagreement is mainly over whether Iran’s leaders would use them. Experts say fitting a chemical agent to a ballistic missile is not especially hard, but dispersing it effectively is more difficult. Iran denies having a chemical weapons programme and calls the accusations psychological warfare. Netanyahu’s office said Israel closely monitors Iranian threats and is prepared to confront them.
The report adds that the US military has a strike plan that could be carried out as early as 4 November, but President Trump had not approved it and diplomatic talks on the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s nuclear programme were continuing.
Reporting note: this relies on one outlet’s account of another outlet’s report, and the underlying intelligence has not been published. Treat it as disputed.
Photo: Israel Defense Forces / CC BY-SA 2.0 / Wikimedia Commons
