סוריה - רמת הגולן

Syria accused Israel on Tuesday of using the Golan Heights as a dumping ground for nuclear waste _ a charge the Jewish state's ambassador to the world's disarmament body flatly rejected.

Syrian Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari told the 65-nation Conference on Disarmament that all Arab states were committed to creating a zone in the Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.

"However, Israel, which has unambiguous support from major nuclear weapon states, continues to reject the will of the international community and dumps its nuclear waste in the Syrian Golan Heights," said Ja'afari, the first speaker in Tuesday's session.

Itzhak Levanon, the Israeli ambassador, retorted in Arabic that Ja'afari's speech was full of "repetitive, inaccurate information," but did not take up the question of nuclear waste dumping in the Golan Heights.

Later, Levanon told The Associated Press: "This issue was raised by the Syrians during the Commission on Human Rights and I refuted it completely, and I am refuting it now."

He said Syrians were trying to use the Geneva-based disarmament body, the world's main forum for global arms control treaties, to promote misinformation over political issues that do not deal with arms control.

Israel has controlled the Golan Heights since the 1967 Middle East War.

Ja'afari, in response to Levanon, said: "It was the arsenal of international resolutions" condemning Israel for its position on weapons of mass destruction, not Syria, laying the blame.

Israel, he noted, was the only Middle East country not to have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the 1968 global convention to control the spread of nuclear weapons. He said Israel was refusing to engage in nuclear disarmament.

"Israel's first condition is that the nuclear weapon must remain in its hand," Ja'afari said.

Experts say Israel has the world's sixth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, but the Jewish state neither acknowledges nor denies having such a program.

Without mentioning Iran by name, Ja'afari said Israel's position on disarmament was unfair when "other states in the region cannot achieve the means of using nuclear powers for peaceful purposes."

Iran says its nuclear program is designed solely to generate electricity, but the United States and Israel claim the program is a cover for producing an atomic bomb.

Ja'afari also accused other countries, which he didn't identify, of helping Israel defy "the priority of saving peace and security in the world."

"At the same time, major nuclear weapon states continue to provide Israel with the latest nuclear technology," he said.

But Levanon said these were all old allegations.

"We have joined every year the consensus calling for the establishment of a free zone in the Middle East, free of weapons of mass destruction," he told The AP. "But we set up also the circumstances for when this could be possible."

"He repeated all the time the same claims, so I stopped him because they were unfounded," Levanon said.

Earlier this month, Uzi Arad, director of Israel's Institute of Policy and Strategy, said that with Mideast peace prospects unlikely, pressure on Israel to eliminate nuclear arms is not on the international agenda.