Israel was likely one of the sponsors of the assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy due to his strong opposition to former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion who wanted to develop nuclear weapons, an American scholar says.

“The best way to understand the assassination is to draw distinction between the sponsors, the facilitators and the mechanics,” said James Henry Fetzer, a retired professor in Madison, Wisconsin.

“The sponsors included the CIA, the joint chiefs, the anti-Castro Cubans, the Texas oilmen and Israel where JFK was at loggerheads with David Ben-Gurion because Ben-Gurion wanted Israel to develop nuclear weapons which JFK opposed,” Fetzer told Press TV on Monday.

The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known unofficially as the Warren Commission, was established by former President Lyndon B. Johnson in November 1963 to investigate the assassination of Kennedy.

The commission's final report released in September concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted entirely alone in assassinating Kennedy.

However, many researchers are also unconvinced by the official government account and argue that Oswald was part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, perhaps in connection with Israel, Cuba or the former Soviet Union.

Israel had a motive to kill Kennedy because the president was opposed to the regime's nuclear weapons program at Dimona which he believed could instigate a nuclear arms-race in the Middle East.

Kennedy encountered tensions with the Israelis regarding the production of nuclear materials in Dimona.

Israel resisted pressure by the Kennedy administration to open its nuclear facilities to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections and misled American scientists who visited Dimona in 1962.