Israel's civil defenses are not ready to protect the population in a missile war, an opposition lawmaker said on Monday, fueling debate about the feasibility of an attack on Iran's nuclear program.Almost one in four Israelis lack access to bomb shelters, whether communal or reinforced rooms in private homes, said Zeev Bielski, chairman of a parliamentary panel on Israel's home defense preparations.
"Are we prepared for a war? No," he told Reuters. "Things are moving too slowly and we are wasting very precious time."
Such shelters could be vital if Israel were to attack Iran's nuclear facilities with Tehran and its regional allies likely to retaliate.
Israel says 100,000 rockets and missiles are pointed at it, many of these held by Syria, Lebanon's Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Hamas.
Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a visiting scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on Hezbollah, said an attack on Iran would likely cause a retaliatory attack from the Lebanese group.
"It has been publicly declared that the US and their allies see all three actors [Iran, Hezbollah and Syria] as interlinked. So a strike on Iran would be a way of striking Hezbollah," she told Al-Akhbar.
"I would imagine that Hezbollah, if Israel engaged in a strike on Iran that was unfettered by the international community...would simply respond to the violations with a similar response to which Israel would then escalate."
The Civil Defense Ministry, which was set up after Israel suffered thousands of rocket strikes in the 2006 Lebanon war, confirmed Bielski's data while seeking to play down his alarm.
"Our position remains that if everyone does what they are expected to do during an emergency, the situation will be tenable," one ministry official said.
That appeared to reinforce remarks in November by Defense Minister Ehud Barak that, should Iran retaliate for an attack with missile salvos against Israel, it could inflict fewer than 500 fatalities "if everyone stays in their homes."
However Hezbollah's military capacity has improved since the 2006 war.
In 2009 Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah claimed that they had the military capacity to hit Tel Aviv in any future war, while he has also claimed that they have anti-aircraft missiles. Saad-Ghorayeb said it was likely that these claims were true.
"Nasrallah has explained once about the nature of Hezbollah's psychological warfare. He said that there is black propaganda and white propaganda and they don't lie," she said.
"Hezbollah has never engaged in that kind of unfounded sabre rattling or bravado. Everything thing Hezbollah have threatened we have later seen has actually happened. So I would imagine that Hezbollah has the capability and has medium-range missiles [that could hit Tel Aviv]."
Al-Akhbar, Reuters
Uprooted Palestinian 
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