Israel on Wednesday admitted it bombed a suspected Syrian nuclear facility 11 years ago, and Israeli offials used the confirmation to boast about their country’s military might and again threaten Iran.
“The message from the 2007 attack on the reactor is that Israel will not tolerate construction that can pose an existential threat,” military chief Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot said in a statement. “This was the message in 1981 [when Israel bombed a nuclear plant in Baghdad,], this is the message in 2007, and this is the future message to our enemies.”
The overnight operation dubbed “Outside the Box” took place from Sept. 5-6, 2007, when F16s and F15s carried out the airstrikes against what the U.S. and Israel say was a reactor built with help from North Korea.
Israel—a nuclear-armed power but not a signatory of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—argues that the facility in Syria’s Deir ez-Zor region was “in its last stages of construction.” Syria, which is a party to the treaty, has denied it was building a reactor.
As with its United Nations Security Council-condemned strike on the Iraqi facility, Israel argued that purpose of the Syrian facility was to produce a bomb.
According to James Jeffrey, George W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser, the U.S. president backed the attack at the time.
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