AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
Jerusalem: Israel conducted a successful test-firing of its Arrow anti-missile missile against an Iranian-style rocket on Friday, just a day after the Jewish state ratcheted up the rhetoric against Tehran over its suspected nuclear weapons programme.
“The test's success is a future major step in the system's operational improvements to deal with future incoming ballistic missile threats,” the defence ministry said.
The test of the Arrow, or Hetz in Hebrew, followed a warning by Sharon that the Jewish state would never allow Iran to come into possession of nuclear weapons, joining the mounting Western concern over Tehran's atomic activities.
The Arrow intercepted a missile styled on Iran's long-range Shahab 3 which Israel's Mossad spy agency once described as the greatest threat to Israel's existence since its creation in 1948.
The defence ministry described it as a “routine development test” to demonstrate the system's improved performance. “It was the 14th Arrow interceptor test and the ninth test of the complete weapon system.”
First launched in 1988 during the now-defunct Star Wars strategy under former US president Ronald Reagan, the US-inspired Arrow programme was stepped up after Israel was hit by 39 Iraqi Scud missiles during the 1991 Gulf war that left two people dead.
Development of the Arrow is now half-funded by the United States, which provides Israel with about three billion dollars in military and civilian aid each year.
Israel has repeatedly warned that Iran may be close to developing a nuclear weapon, with Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom saying in October that it might be as little as six months away from having the means to build the bomb.
“Israel, and not only Israel, cannot accept a situation in which Iran would be in possession of nuclear weapons,” Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told journalists on Thursday.
“We must do everything possible to prepare for such a situation. But Israel is not spearheading any campaign” against Iran's suspected nuclear weapons ambitions, he added.
Since the downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, Israel has come to regard Iran as its number one enemy.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad caused an international backlash in October when he called for the Jewish state to be “wiped off the map”.
In a bid to defuse the row the Iranian foreign ministry said Tehran had “never resorted to, nor threatened to resort to force against another country.”
The United States called Thursday on Iran to return to talks on its nuclear activities after the International Atomic Energy Agency put off taking Tehran to the UN Security Council to give more time for new Russian diplomacy to work.
Negotiations with the European Union collapsed in August when Iran ended its suspension of uranium conversion, the first step towards making enriched uranium which can be used to fuel nuclear reactors or as the explosive core of atom bombs.
Israel itself is widely believed to possess around 200 nuclear warheads, although it has never confirmed or denied this and has not signed up to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
In 1981, it carried out an air strike against Iraq's French-built Osirak nuclear plant.
