A New Front in the North: Israel Confronts a Nuclear Threat From the Terrorist Turned Diplomat

Israel Confronts a Nuclear Threat From the Terrorist Turned Diplomat

Valerie Locke

had found “a few tons of nuclear material that could be put to bad use” at an undisclosed site dating to the Assad era, which Syria’s transitional government voluntarily reported to the agency on July 17. Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani said the material, several tons of natural uranium metal along with quantities of graphite, would remain in Syrian custody under IAEA safeguards rather than be removed from the country, and asserted Syria’s “sovereign and legal right” to pursue a peaceful nuclear program. Al-Shaibani did not raise the possibility of the material’s removal at any point in his remarks. Separately, Axios reported that the United States, Israel, and Syria reached a quiet agreement to deal with nuclear material, including yellowcake, that Israel says the Assad regime stored at “Site 99,” material officials say cannot fuel a nuclear weapon but could be used in a radiological dispersal device, a so-called dirty bomb. Israeli forces reportedly bombed the site’s entrances shortly after Assad’s fall to block access to it, and Israeli officials told Axios they threatened further strikes and grew concerned that Turkey was helping Syria’s new government reach the material, before Washington brought the IAEA in to broker a resolution. That material, too, has not yet been removed from the country as of this week, according to US officials.

Israel now faces the prospect of a new and unfamiliar danger on its northern border: several tons of nuclear material remaining inside Syria, in the custody of a government whose president has declared his intention to pursue a nuclear program, and who Washington itself was hunting under a ten-million-dollar bounty less than a decade ago. 

This week’s disclosure that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors found several tons of undeclared nuclear material inside Syria, and the resolution of a months-long, secret standoff between Israel, the United States, and Damascus over a second stockpile at a site known as “Site 99,” together mark the reemergence of exactly the kind of unconventional threat Israel has spent nearly two decades trying to ensure never took root on its border again, this time under a leader whose credentials for running the country holding it remain, at best, freshly laundered.

IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi told reporters in Damascus this week that inspectors had found “a few tons of nuclear material that could be put to bad use” at an undisclosed site dating to the Assad era, which Syria’s transitional government voluntarily reported to the agency on July 17. Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani said the material, several tons of natural uranium metal along with quantities of graphite, would remain in Syrian custody under IAEA safeguards rather than be removed from the country, and asserted Syria’s “sovereign and legal right” to pursue a peaceful nuclear program. Al-Shaibani did not raise the possibility of the material’s removal at any point in his remarks.

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