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TEHRAN, Dec 14 (AFP) - Former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani raised the spectre Friday of possible nuclear conflict in the Middle East.
Rafsanjani, speaking at the weekly Muslim prayers in Tehran, said that because Israel does not have enough soldiers to defend itself, Western powers had "provided her with unconventional arms of mass destruction, chemical and nuclear."
"The use of an atomic bomb against Israel would totally destroy Israel, while (the same) against the Islamic world would only cause damage. Such a scenario is not inconceivable," he said.
Rafsanjani, who heads Iran's powerful Expediency Council, said that "if the Islamic world
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armed itself with the same arms, then that equilibrium would be broken".
But "we do not want the world to fall victim to insecurity, and we do not want the confrontation ... to turn into World War Three. That is the worst that could happen."
He was speaking at Tehran University, where tens of thousands of demonstrators converged Friday in a march of solidarity with the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.
President Mohammed Khatami, as well as a number of cabinet ministers, MPs and other leading figures, participated in the march.
Similar marches were held across the country to mark "World Qods (Jerusalem) Day," instituted in 1980 by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of Iran's Islamic republic
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