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A Twitter account run by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Friday threatened to blow up the city of Dimona in the Negev desert, where a nuclear facility is located. The IRGC account, with its 12,100 followers, posted a video showing multiple explosions in a desert. “Then on the day, we [God] will deal you the fiercest blow. We will surely inflict punishment, “ the IRGC wrote in Arabic, citing a quote from the Koran, adding the hashtag “Dimona.” The video is post-dated to Friday. The account provides a link to the IRGC’s Telegram account, with its 376,084 subscribers....

Like many of Egypt’s towns and cities, Port Said is bustling. Donkey-carts weave through traffic on roads, while westerners – once the focus of local hostility – move about undisturbed. Sitting at the northern mouth of the Suez Canal, many call Port Said Egypt’s most beautiful city. It is also a popular tourist destination for cruise ships, which roll in and out, unloading their passengers at Egypt’s second largest port. Here, the visitors watch as cargo vessels line up to enter the canal – a 150km stretch of water that links the Red and Mediterranean seas, cutting out the long...

TROUBLED pop queen Whitney Houston is dabbling with a strict Hebrew sect in a bid to sort out her life. The singer was in Israel with wayward husband Bobby Brown yesterday to find out more about the Jewish group. The pair also prayed at Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Whitney, 39, who had a No1 hit with Saving All My Love For You, became interested in the Black Hebrews after her sister-in-law Pat joined them. They are an African-American community that moved to Israel in 1969 and settled in the southern town of Dimona. Followers are banned from eating...

ITS CUPOLA dully glinting in the sun, across kilometres of an exclusion zone in the Negev Desert, the nuclear reactor near the Israeli town of Dimona has for decades been the subject of intense speculation. Its bland official name, the Centre for Nuclear Research, belies a martial purpose. Foreign intelligence services, atomic scientists and a former Israeli employee claim that it is the source of fissile material used to make Israel’s nuclear weapons. The country’s atomic secrets have always been closely guarded, so little is known about the plant at Dimona. However, officials at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC)...

Astudy conducted by the US based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) estimated that Israel had 115 nuclear bombs in its possession in 2014. The study was composed by the institute's founder David Albright, and was part of a more comprehensive study on the worldwide inventory of plutonium. The study estimated that Israel produced plutonium at a rapid pace in the past 50 years since the inception of its nuclear reactor in Dimona, acquiring 660 kilograms of plutonium, taking into account an estimation error of 150 kilograms. A single nuclear bomb requires 3-5 kg of plutonium, the study estimated....

In the midst of controversy over the Israeli prime minister's plans to address Congress next month, a researcher has won the release of a decades-old Defense Department report detailing the U.S. government's extensive help to Israel in that nation's development of a nuclear bomb. "I am struck by the degree of cooperation on specialized war making devices between Israel and the US," said Roger Mattson, a former memer of the Atomic Energy Commission technical staff. The 1987 report, "Critical Technology Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations," compares the key Israeli facilities developing nuclear weapons to Los Alamos and Oak Ridge...

The terrorist group Hamas claimed late Wednesday that it attempted to target Israel's nuclear reactor in the desert town of Dimona by firing three long-range M-75 rockets at the facility. One of the rockets was destroyed in mid-flight by Israel's Iron Dome system, and two fell harmlessly in the rocky Negev. However, merely by targeting the nuclear facility, Hamas has committed nuclear terrorism, according to United Nations treaties. Article 2 (1) of the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism states: 1. Any person commits an offence within the meaning of this Convention if that person unlawfully...

The estimate shows that in 1983 the CIA had hard evidence that Israel possessed a chemical weapons stockpile of indeterminate size, including...almost certainly sarin. ...the CIA assessment suggests that the Israelis accelerated their research and development work on chemical weapons following the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. According to the report, U.S. intelligence detected "possible tests" of Israeli chemical weapons in January 1976, which, again, almost certainly took place somewhere in the Negev Desert. A former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer whom I interviewed recalled that at about this time, the National Security Agency captured communications showing that...

The leader of Lebanese Shia militant movement Hezbollah has said that his group was behind the launch of a drone shot down over Israel last week. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah told the movement's al-Manar television network that the drone was made in Iran and had flown over "sensitive sites" in Israel. Israeli fighter planes shot down the drone north of the Negev desert after it entered from the Mediterranean.... Sheikh Nasrallah said the drone was assembled in Lebanon but made in Iran.... Sheikh Nasrallah said: "A sophisticated reconnaissance aircraft was sent from Lebanese territory... and travelled hundreds of kilometres over the...

Iranian media say a U.S. think tank reports Tehran can strike the "Israeli nuclear complex at Dimona or the Israeli airbases without drawing the United States into a war." The state-controlled Fars News Agency reported Wednesday that “a group of U.S. presidential advisers at the Wilson Center warned that Iran could engage in at least token missile/rocket strikes against the attacker, targeting sites in Israel or U.S. facilities in the region.“ The advisers allegedly said that the Obama administration should avoid any military adventurism against Iran because it could backfire. "According to unclassified estimates, Iran probably has at least two...

Report: Israel used centrifuges identical to those in Iran to test out worm that set Teheran's nuclear program years back; virus was authorized by Bush administration, rather than allow an Israeli attack. Israel tested the Stuxnet virus in Dimona, according to a Sunday report by The New York Times. Israel reportedly has centrifuges that are identical to those at the Iranian nuclear site in Natanz, which were used to test the Stuxnet computer worm. In 2008, the Times reported, German company Siemens cooperated with the Idaho National Laboratory, allowing it to identify problems in the comany's computer controllers, which are...

An Israeli warplane has shot down a "suspicious object" flying over the southern part of the Dead Sea, the military said, adding that the intruder appeared to have been a balloon. The country's main nuclear reactor is about 30 kilometres from the Dead Sea, at Dimona in the Negev desert. "Air force planes were scrambled after a suspicious object was seen," a military spokeswoman told AFP yesterday. "It was shot down." She did not elaborate. Local news site Ynet said one of the planes fired a missile at the object "which was hovering close to the nuclear research institute at...

An unnamed senior officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards warned Thursday that Iran would strike Israel if it is targeted, no matter who the attacker is. According to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai, the officer said, "Iran has thousands of surface-to-surface missiles, including improved Zelzal-2 and Al-Fatah 110 missiles, with which it will set alight all of the oil towns, facilities and infrastructures of the neighboring countries, if these serve as platforms for attacking it.” Any attack upon Iran will lead to a massive missile attack on Israel, he said, including the nuclear power plant at Dimona, no matter where the...

Israel will keep up its longstanding policy of deliberate ambiguity over its nuclear programme, Defence Minister Ehud Barak said on Tuesday, adding that US support for the position remains unchanged. "This is a good policy and there is no reason to change it. There is complete agreement with the United States on this question," Barak told army radio. He also said "there is no risk" that inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would get authorisation to inspect Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor. "There is no threat over the traditional agreements between Israel and the United States on this issue,"...

The United States has begun denying visas to Israel's nuclear scientists, according to the Hebrew-language daily Maariv. Workers at the reactor in Dimona told the paper that they had been treated poorly by US representatives, and had been told they could not travel to the States. A former Dimona worker told Maariv that the problems between Israel and America went beyond denied visas. The US has also created a “de-facto embargo” on equipment needed in the Dimona reactor, he said. The refusal to sell Israel certain parts began after current US President Barack Obama took office, he said. When it...

In a new and ridiculous policy, the US is denying Israeli scientists who work at the Dimona reactor site an opportunity to refresh their knowedge, Joshua Pundit reports: Ma'ariv reported today that the Israeli government was stunned when every nuclear technician at Israel's Dimona reactor who had submitted visa requests to visit the United States for ongoing university education in Physics, Chemistry and Nuclear Engineering had their visa applications summarily rejected, specifically because of their association with the Dimona reactor.

The Israeli air force scrambled fighter jets on Tuesday after a light aircraft flew into restricted air space over its nuclear reactor in the southern Negev desert, the military said. The warplanes intercepted the aircraft and forced it to land at a nearby airstrip, where the two pilots were handed over to civilian authorities for investigation, an army spokeswoman said. Police had no immediate comment but Israeli media reported that the two men, from central Israel, claimed to have lost their way. Aircraft are forbidden from flying over the reactor near the desert town of Dimona. Israel says the reactor...

Publication: Terrorism Monitor Volume: 7 Issue: 14 04:31 PM Age: 11 hrs By: Urged by a senior al-Qaeda ideologue to take over Pakistan, members of jihadi internet forums have begun to examine the possibility of controlling Pakistan’s nuclear weapons (al-faloja1.com, April 24). At the same time, jihadis continue to collect information on nuclear facilities around the globe, especially Israel’s nuclear projects, waiting for an opportunity to perpetrate successful terrorist attacks against these facilities after massive terrorist attacks using conventional weapons failed to give rise to the global supremacy of Islamic law (al-faloja1.com, April 22). On March 14, al-Fajr Media Center...

"OPERATION CAST LEAD The IDF's Fight Against Terror in Gaza" # A blessed New Year to everyone here and abroad. Today's thread beginning January 1, 2009 (U.S.A. Time)

Al-Qaeda Draws New Recruits Via Internet Al-Qaeda is using the Internet to recruit vulnerable young people to its terrorist network, according to a programme aired on Saudi Arabian TV late on Tuesday. Umm Osama, the founder of al-Qaeda's first women-only website, al-Khansa, joined several others on the programme to discuss how they renounced jihadist ideology. Among those who sought a response to this question was an imam from the Medina mosque, Saleh Ibn Awad al-Mudamsi, and the father of a young al-Qaeda suspect held in an Iraqi prison. Read More Qaeda Targets U.S. Oil Interests in North Africa U.S....