(Adds Netanyahu comments, paragraphs 6-7) By Dan Williams HERZLIYA, Israel, Feb 4 (Reuters) - Israel has a year or so in which to attack Iran's nuclear facilities preemptively, an Israeli legislator and weapons expert said on Wednesday. Israeli forces could pull off successful strikes independently, Isaac Ben-Israel said, though these would only delay, rather than end, Iran's progress towards atomic weaponry. Echoing government assessments that Iran is about a year away from making enough enriched uranium for a bomb, Ben-Israel, a member of parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, said the window for last-ditch military action was closing. "Last resort means when you reach the stage when everything else failed. When is this?" Ben-Israel, who is also a retired general and former senior defence official, told an Israeli security conference in Herzliya. "Maybe a year, give or take." Iran says its atomic designs are peaceful but Western nations see a bomb-making potential. The Islamic republic's virulently anti-Israel rhetoric has stirred fears in the Jewish state, assumed to have the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal. Israeli right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu, the frontrunner to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert after a general election next week, said his biggest task if elected would be "to address the Iranian threat in all its aspects". "I believe it's the gravest challenge Israel has faced since the War of Independence in 1948. We will work on all levels to neutralise this danger," he told the Herzliya Conference. "There is no other country that faces a similar threat." Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, said this week Iran would face technical and political hurdles if it sought to build nuclear arms and there was "ample time" to deal with the issue. "Even if I go by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence, the estimations (are)... we're still talking about two to five years from now" for Iran to have nuclear weapons capacity, he said. MILITARY OPTION "POSSIBLE" Like Israel, U.S. President Barack Obama has refused to rule out using force to deny Iran the bomb. But in break with the administration of President George W. Bush, Obama has pledged to talk directly with Tehran about its uranium enrichment plans. For now, Washington is tackling the dispute with a "carrot and stick" combination of diplomatic overtures and sanctions. Israel bombed Iraq's atomic reactor in 1981 and carried out a similar sortie over Syria in 2007 which the CIA said destroyed a secret reactor, though Damascus denied having such a facility. Many independent analysts believe Israel's air force is too small to take on Iran's nuclear installations, which are numerous, distant, dispersed and fortified. But Ben-Israel, who belongs to the centrist, ruling Kadima party and once headed the Defence Ministry's weapons research and development unit, disagreed with that assessment. "The military option is possible. It's possible also for the independent forces of the State of Israel. It's possible in the sense of delaying (the Iranian programme) for a few years. It won't be more than three years, say, and the more time passes, the more it (the potential delay) is diminishing." He said Iran was steadily stockpiling enriched uranium and would eventually recover from any attack to produce more. Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak called for a "strategic agreement" with the United States on Iran's nuclear programme. Such a pact, he said in a speech on Tuesday, would ensure the duration of any talks the new U.S. administration might hold with Iran "should be kept short and followed by harsh sanctions and readiness to take action". Barak said "all options" must be kept on the table in preventing a nuclear Iran that "would be a danger not just to Israel but also to the region and the entire world". (Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish, a Palestinian doctor who worked in one of Israel's main hospitals, speaks to the media in Tel Hashomer hospital near Tel Aviv in this January 17, 2009 ...
