CAIRO -- The Arab League urged Arab states to step up pressure on Israel to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Wednesday, as it announced a conference on weapons of mass destruction to be held next week in Cairo, AFP reported.

Arab states "must take the necessary steps to force Israel to join the NPT" and respect International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolutions, League Secretary General Esmat Abdel Meguid said in a statement.

Such resolutions call for opening nuclear facilities to inspection.

The conference scheduled for January 14-16 is tasked with developing a draft treaty banning weapons of mass destruction from the Middle East, Abdel Meguid said in the statement.

"Israel is the only country to have nuclear weapons in the Middle East," said Abdel Meguid who was in Tunis with other Arab foreign ministers for a meeting of the follow-up committee created after the 21-22 October Cairo summit to support the Palestinian cause.

Israel's refusal to sign the NPT represents "a direct threat" to regional security by "putting pressure" on other countries to procure nuclear weapons, he said, according to a statement quoted by colleagues here.

The league's expert on weapons of mass destruction, Mohammed al-Fateh, said the Arab summit follow-up committee called on December 10 for "the creation of a nuclear-weapons-free region."

Israel is one of four countries around the world that have failed to sign the treaty, adopted in 1970 to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. The others are Cuba, India and Pakistan.

Israel has never publicly acknowledged possessing nuclear weapons and refuses to submit its nuclear facilities to inspection by the IAEA.

Western experts say it has used its reactor at Dimona in the southern Negev desert to produce around 200 nuclear warheads.