US: Democrats Urge Rubio to Acknowledge ’Israel’ Possesses Nuclear Weapons 

By Staff, Agencies 

House Democrats have asked the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to publicly announce that the “Israeli” entity possesses nuclear weapons, urging Washington to end decades of ambiguity over the issue amid the conflict with Iran.

In a letter sent on Monday, 30 Democrats wrote that it was unsustainable for Donald Trump to collaborate with the “Israeli” prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on a military campaign against Iran - with the stated goal of preventing the country from obtaining a nuclear weapon - without publicly acknowledging the US ally’s possession of the bomb.

“We are, in the fullest sense, fighting this war side by side with a ‘country’ whose potential nuclear weapons program the United States government officially refuses to acknowledge,” reads the letter, which was led by the Texas Democrat Joaquin Castro.

“Congress has a constitutional responsibility to be fully informed about the nuclear balance in the Middle East, the risk of escalation by any party to this conflict, and the administration’s planning and contingencies for such scenarios. We do not believe we have received that information.”
 

The lawmakers also noted that Israeli government officials had nodded towards their possession of the weapons, with the heritage minister, Amichai Eliyahu, saying in 2023 that using a nuclear bomb in Gaza was “one of the possibilities” after the 7 October attacks. In 2006, Ehud Olmert, then “Israel’s” prime minister, told a German broadcaster that Iran was “aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, ‘Israel’, Russia”.

The Democrats objected to the continued reticence by Trump administration officials to discuss the subject openly, noting that when Castro asked Thomas DiNanno, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, to detail “Israel’s” nuclear capabilities at a congressional hearing in March, he responded that he could not answer.

“The United States openly acknowledges the nuclear weapons programs of the United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, Russia, China, and North Korea. We ask that ‘Israel’ be held to the same standard as any other foreign ‘country’, and that the United States government speaks candidly about its potential nuclear weapons capabilities, whatever they may be,” the letter reads.

“We ask that you hold ‘Israel’ to the same standard of transparency that the United States expects from any other country that may be pursuing or retaining nuclear weapons capability,” the lawmakers told Rubio.