Israel wants to send witnesses and provide testimony in the trial of Saddam Hussein - for firing 39 Scud missiles at the country in the 1991 Gulf War and for funding terrorism against it.
Remarking that it would make a pleasant change for Israel to be pressing charges at an international criminal court rather than defending itself, the Israeli Justice Minister, Mr Yosef Lapid, instructed his officials to begin compiling a "Saddam file".
Iraq had fired the Scuds, which caused widespread damage and one fatality, "without any provocation, at a country that had nothing to do with the war", Mr Lapid said, calling this "a war crime in every legal sense. We are one of the victims of his aggression. We will be there [at the trial]".
The Israeli Defence Minister, Mr Shaul Mofaz, said the Israeli charges should also relate to Saddam's financing and encouragement of suicide bombers.
The Iraqi regime distributed numerous payments, totalling an estimated $35 million, to the families of Palestinian bombers, and of gunmen and non-combatants killed in Intifada clashes with Israeli troops.
The Israeli opposition leader, Labour's Mr Shimon Peres, is urging the Bush administration to make the captured Iraqi president's trial an international media event. Israel had done so in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Nazis' so-called "Final Solution" - their policy of killing all Jews in Europe.
Captured by the Israeli secret service, Mossad, in Argentina, Eichmann was convicted in Jerusalem of crimes against humanity and hanged in 1962.
Such a trial, Mr Peres said, would serve as a lesson for the Palestinians.
"We learned a lot abut the Holocaust from the Eichmann trial, and it set a precedent for public trials," said the former prime minister and Nobel peace laureate.
"It is also important for the Palestinians to see the depths a dictator can take them to."
The Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, who sided with Saddam in the first Gulf War, has made no immediate comment on the former dictator's capture. Other Palestinian Authority officials are also saying little beyond asserting that his fate has nothing to do with the Palestinians.
However, Saddam has been a hugely popular figure among ordinary Palestinians, some of whom stood on rooftops to cheer the 1991 Scuds on Tel Aviv.
Some Palestinians yesterday held a second day of pro-Saddam protest on the streets of Khan Younis and Rafah, in the Gaza Strip
Hamas spokesmen have condemned the US over both the fact and manner of Saddam's capture, declaring that America will "pay a very high price for the mistake".
Meanwhile, Israeli troops shot dead two unarmed Palestinians at a Gaza-Israel border fence yesterday morning. The two were in a group of six who crossed into a closed border zone.