Iran's leader will meet Saddam's fate, says Peres

The Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will come to the same end as Saddam Hussein, Shimon Peres predicted at the weekend amid growing Israeli impatience with the international community's failure to curb Tehran's march towards the nuclear club.

Israel's elder statesman, who was number two on the victorious Kadima list in last month's parliamentary elections, denounced the hard-line Iranian leader as a representative of Satan, not God. "History," he said, "has known how to ostracise the lunatics and those who brandish swords. Everyone who behaves like that ends the same way."

Mr Peres was speaking a day after Mr Ahmadinejad told a Palestinian solidarity conference in Tehran: "Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading towards annihilation. The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm. Our power is growing, while the Zionists' power of resistance is growing weaker. Israel is a danger, but that danger is about to end."

Last week, Mr Ahmadinejad announced that Iran had successfully enriched uranium and would soon be able to build an atomic bomb. It has already tested delivery systems that could reach Israel and other Middle Eastern states.

The Institute for Science and International Security, an American think-tank, published satellite photographs yesterday showing that Iran has built a new tunnel entrance to a uranium conversion laboratory in Isfahan and has reinforced two cascade halls - in which uranium is enriched in centrifuges - against aerial attack.

"This entrance is indicative of a new underground facility or further expansion of existing ones," said the ISIS. Its director, David Albright, a former UN arms inspector, added: "Iran is taking extraordinary precautions to try to protect its nuclear assets."

Richard Clarke, a former White House counter-terrorism chief, warned the Bush administration against a military strike on Iranian reactors. President George Bush has dismissed reports of such plans as "wild speculation". Mr Clarke, who has advised three presidents, wrote in The New York Times: "A conflict with Iran could be even more damaging to our interests than the current struggle in Iraq has been." He recalled that the Clinton administration had also considered a bombing campaign against Iran amid tensions in the 1990s, but "after a long debate, the highest levels of the military could not forecast a way in which things would end favourably for the United States". Although Israel has not excluded a rerun of its 1981 destruction of Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak near Baghdad, it is rattling no sabres. It prefers to play a supporting role in efforts to isolate the Islamic republic.

Mr Peres cautioned: "Israel needs to let the United States and the international community lead the campaign to defend world peace from the Iranian leader. We must not let Israel stand at the head of the campaign, since then it will be perceived as an Israeli-Iranian issue and could lead to an end of international pressure." Nonetheless, senior Israeli military intelligence officers complain that the international response is too weak. "Iran spat in the world's face," one of them told The Jerusalem Post, "but the world hasn't done anything. The way it looks now, it is doubtful that the United Nations and the international efforts will succeed in stopping Iran."

* With infighting between the old and new regimes tearing Palestinian politics apart, Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas Prime Minister, has appealed to rival parties to join a national unity coalition. "The door is open to Fatah," a spokesman said. But President Mahmoud Abbas's party, which declined to attend an emergency meeting in Gaza, is in no hurry to agree.

Speaking in a mosque on Friday, Mr Haniyeh accused the President of forging "an unholy alliance" with the international community, which is boycotting Hamas officials, to bring down his government. Fatah spokesmen blamed Hamas for destroying the Palestinian economy and urged the Islamic movement to endorse previous agreements with Israel.