OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, October 16 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Within three years, the Middle East could turn into an arena of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, which, because of the blindness of Israel's extreme right-wing, could bring catastrophe upon Israel, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres told the Knesset on Wednesday October 16.

"You are leading Israel to a place from which there is no escape," Peres said of the far-right's opposition to diplomatic contacts with the Arabs, reported the Israeli Haaretz newspaper on its web site.

Reacting angrily to ultra-nationalist Knesset member Zvi Hendel's remark that had he lived, foremer Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin would have pressed for canceling the Oslo peace agreements, Peres defended the agreements saying "I don't regret this, I am proud of this, and Rabin would have stood here, just like me!"

Hendel had called in parliament for a vote to scrap the 1993 Oslo accords, negotiated by Rabin and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

Peres stressed that U.S. President George W. Bush's vision of a future Israeli-Palestinian peace was the "continuation of the end of the Oslo agreements."

Bush set out his vision for a Palestinian state next to a secure Israel within three years in a key speech on June 24.

To Hendler's catcalls, Peres said of Rabin, whose 1995 assassination will be commemorated in Israel on Wednesday evening and Thursday, "I knew him better than you, and [unlike you] he had courage and had no demogoguery in him."

Peres also attacked the rabbis of the Yesha settler movement, who this week issued calls advising soldiers against "evacuating their brothers" from the so-called illegal settlement outposts in the West Bank.

Under international law and UN resolutions, all Israeli settlements are illegal and are considered an obstacle to peace in the Middles East.

"You have no alternative, other than virtual illusions. The rabbis of Yesha are the politicians of Yesha, the terrible politicians of Yesha," Peres said, adding that they were unfaithful to Israel's moral heritage.

Israel will mark on Thursday October 17, the seventh anniversary, according to the Jewish calendar, of Rabin's November 4, 1995 assassination by a right-wing Jewish extremist for having signed the accord with Arafat, setting up limited Palestinian self-rule as preparation for statehood in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, said Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Peres, who together with Arafat shared the Nobel peace prize for his central role as an architect of the Oslo accords, is foreign minister in the government of hardliner right-wing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.