In a television interview with Egypt’s Sada el-Balad channel, Aboul Gheit explained: “The agreement promises that Israel will never talk about nuclear weapons even after centuries, while the United States promises to remain silent.”
According to Al-Mayadeen’s report, the Arab League secretary-general accused the United States of deceiving Arab countries, recalling meetings in Cairo and Washington where the United States urged Egypt to ratify the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in exchange for putting pressure on “Israel”. “Egypt refused,” he said, noting that such pressure “never materialized.”
Abul Gheit attributed the global silence over Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons to U.S. protection, saying that Israel is “protected by the dominant military and political pole that has dominated the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990.”
The former Egyptian foreign minister went on to explain that Cairo had deliberately refrained from ratifying the Convention on Chemical and Biological Weapons, stressing that it “does not see the need for a nuclear deterrent” because “its drawbacks far outweigh its potential benefits.”
He added that Egyptian diplomacy has consistently advocated a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, and argued that international inspections of Israel’s nuclear facilities could be “inevitable.”
Abul Gheit warned that such a development could create an existential crisis in the region and force the US government to reconsider its long-standing protection of Israel, concluding by noting that “Israel was not even able to use nuclear weapons during the 1973 war.”
MNA