Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR)

 military, biological, weapons, scientific research institute / centre

CBW Research Center (Ness Ziona)

Israel's primary chemical and biological warfare facility is at Nes Ziyyona [Noss Ziona], near Tel Aviv. The Israeli Institute for Bio-Technology is believed to be the home of both offensive and defensive research. Israel's biotechnology industry is relatively new and an offspring of its American counterpart. Its creation in the late 1960s resulted from the establishment in Israel of subsidiaries of foreign pharmaceutical companies.

Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) is a government defense research institute specializing in biology, medicinal chemistry and environmental science, and is suspected of also developing biological and chemical weapons, as well as defenses against them. IIBR has approximately 350 employees, 150 of whom are scientists. IIBR is under the jurisdiction of the Prime Minister of Israel's office and works in close cooperation with government agencies. IIBR has many public projects on which it works in cooperations with international research organizations (governmental and non-governmental) and universities.

IIBR was founded in 1952 by Professor Ernst David Bergmann, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's science adviser and the head of R&D at the Ministry of Defense, and Dr. Alexander Keynan. Keynan was IIBR's first director. IIBR also has a non-public scope of operation. Due to its secretive and defense-related nature, it is widely assumed that the institute develops vaccines and antidotes for chemical and biological warfare. Some sources speculate that the IIBR also develops offensive capabilities in these fields. The IIBR provided the poison and the antidote used in the attempted assassination of a Hamas leader (Khaled Mashal) in Jordan in 1997.

El Al Flight 1862, which crashed in the Netherlands in 1992, was carrying cargo destined for the Israel Institute for Biological Research which included 190 litres of dimethyl methylphosphonate, which could be used in the synthesis of Sarin nerve gas. The shipment was from a U.S. chemical plant under a U.S. Department of Commerce licence. Dimethyl methylphosphonate is now a Chemical Weapons Convention schedule 2 chemical.

The facility consists of about a dozen buildings, apparently surrounded by a security perimeter which encloses extensive vegetation that would block external observation of the facility. The facility apparently consists of two complexes. The first complex is a possible access control and administrative area, located near the single entry point to the facility. The second complex, in the interior of the facility, is surrounded by an area cleared of vegetation, which may be associated with an additional inner security perimeter.

www.iibr.gov.il/
www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/israel/cbw.htm