By IANS/AKI,
Jerusalem : Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not attend a summit on nuclear security hosted by the US after he was warned that Egypt and Turkey planned on using the conference to hold the Jewish state to account for its presumed nuclear arsenal.
Intelligence and Atomic Energy Minister Dan Meridor will take Netanyahu’s place at the meeting, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported Friday.
US President Barack Obama is hosting more than 40 countries at the summit which begins in Washington Monday. Israel has never confirmed or denied that it has a nuclear weapon stockpile. The country, along with India, Pakistan and North Korea, has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Haaretz quoted a senior Israeli official as saying, “In the last few days, we have received reports about the intention of several participant states to depart from the issue of fighting terrorism and instead misuse the event to goad Israel” over the treaty.
Obama has made it a focus of his administration to pressure Iran to scrap what he believes is a programme to develop nuclear arms. Along with many western countries the US aims to strengthen UN sanctions on Tehran.
In a historic move, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev signed a landmark nuclear arms treaty in the Czech capital, Prague, on Thursday. The treaty ends months of negotiations and commits the former Cold War enemies to each reduce their deployed strategic warheads to 1,550 – a 30 percent cut – over the next seven years.