NEW YORK (Dispatches) – The UN General Assembly has called on the Zionist regime to take “immediate steps” to surrender its nuclear weapons and implement UN resolutions fully on the establishment of a nuclear weapon-free zone in the Middle East.
The General Assembly vote was carried 149-6 on Thursday. The Zionist regime, Canada, Micronesia, Palau, the U.S. and Liberia opposed the resolution, while 26 countries abstained, including India and many European states.
The resolution was put forward by Palestine and 20 countries, including the regime’s allies in the Middle East such as Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates.
Among other provisions, the draft resolution called for immediate steps towards the full implementation of the resolution on the Middle East adopted by the 1995 Non-Proliferation Treaty. The key component of the package deal adopted in the treaty calls for the creation of a Middle East “zone free of nuclear weapons as well as other weapons of mass destruction” including “their delivery systems.”
The world body insisted that the occupying regime must “accede to the Treaty without further delay, and not to develop, produce, test or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons, to renounce their possession and to place all its unsafeguarded nuclear facilities under full-scope International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards.”
The occupying regime’s possession of nuclear weapons is an open secret. Although it’s widely believed to have a stockpile of nuclear weapons, the apartheid regime neither acknowledges nor denies the existence of a nuclear arsenal. The regime is not a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and has not accepted IAEA safeguards on some of its principal nuclear activities.
Western countries have generally tolerated the regime’s policy of nuclear ambiguity despite the threat it poses to the region. The UN resolution presumes that the occupying regime has such weapons and calls on it to accede to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.