JERUSALEM, 9 January 2005 — An Israeli television channel has for the first time aired footage of Israel’s controversial top-secret Dimona nuclear facility. Channel 10 showed the 15-minute video Friday as part of a documentary on the plant in the southern Negev desert, an installation which international inspectors have never been allowed to visit.
The footage consists essentially of wide shots of the compound’s neatly groomed gardens and there are no close-ups of the dome-shaped reactor, which can only be seen in the background.
Israel has never publicly acknowledged that it maintains a nuclear arsenal but foreign experts say it has used the reactor at Dimona to produce between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads.
Channel 10 refused to say how it obtained the video but the footage was approved by the military censorship, in an apparent change in attitude on the part of the Israeli authorities.
Meanwhile, on Palestinian front, Fadwa Barghouti, wife of jailed Palestinian uprising leader Marwan Barghouti, said yesterday she will give her vote to Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the candidate of the ruling Fatah party, in today’s Palestinian elections.
Fadwa said if her husband was not in jail he would have voted for Abbas too. “We both support a unified Fatah party,” she told the London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat in a phone interview yesterday.
The Israeli authorities transferred Barghouti on Thursday from a separate cell where he had been kept since his arrest twenty months ago to a group cell, Barghouti’s wife said.
“At least he’s relieved now from rats and cockroaches filling his cell, the new cell he shares with four or five other prisoners is cleaner indeed,” she told the newspaper, adding that she hasn’t visited her husband in his new cell yet, but his lawyer will visit him on Tuesday. Barghouti abandoned earlier plans to run in the presidential elections, ending a candidacy that could have shaken up Palestinian politics.
