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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6903092.ece
Israeli special forces have seized a cargo ship carrying 500 tonnes of
weapons that military officials said were being delivered from Iran to its
Lebanese ally Hezbollah.
A squad of small Israeli swift boats sped up to the Francop, an
Antiguan-flagged freighter, just before midnight on Tuesday and boarded the
craft off the coast of Cyprus. The crew offered no resistance and the
charter company insisted that it had no idea there were large amounts of
missiles, rockets, shells, grenades and assault rifles hidden in containers
in the hull.
The haul was by far the largest interception of weapons smuggling since an
Israeli raid in the Red Sea in 2002 on the Karine A, a ship carrying arms
from Iran to Hamas, another Iranian proxy which now controls the Gaza Strip.
Tuesday's raid comes amid rising tensions between Israel and Iran, whose
President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has vowed the wipe the Jewish state off the
map.
Danny Ayalon, the Israeli deputy Foreign Minister, told The Times that the
interception was just the "tip of the iceberg", adding that Israeli
intelligence showed an increasing volume and frequency of Iranian shipments
to its militia allies in the region.
"We found dozens of containers, with hundreds of tonnes of arms bound for
Hezbollah from Iran," said Rani Ben Yehuda, the deputy naval commander.
The ship, which had been under surveillance since it left port in Egypt
earlier this week, was towed to the port of Ashdod in southern Israel, where
the weapons were being inspected. Ehud Barak, the Defence Minister, said
that the operation, codenamed Four Species, was "another success against the
attempts to smuggle weapons to bolster terrorist elements threatening Israel's
security".
The Israeli military said that an Iranian document was found on board,
proving that the arms shipment originated from Iran, although the paper was
not shown to reporters.
"It's a cargo certificate that shows that it was from a port in Iran," the
military spokeswoman Lieutenant-Colonel Avital Leibovich said. "All the
cargo certificates are stamped at the ports of origin, and this one was
stamped at an Iranian port."
The raid in international waters fed into Israeli fears that Hezbollah,
which is Iran's closest ally and fought Israel to a standstill in the South
Lebanon war in 2006, is restocking its arsenal, which was thought to include
about 40,000 rockets.
Earlier this week, Major General Amos Yadlin warned that the Palestinian
militant group Hamas, which is under tight Israeli blockade in the southern
enclave of Gaza, had test-launched a rocket capable of hitting the southern
outskirts of Tel Aviv.
Israel fears that if any military operation is launched against Iran's
nuclear programme, Tehran will not only retaliate with its own long-range
missiles, but also order its auxiliaries in Lebanon and Gaza to launch a
barrage deep into Israel's cities.
Until now, Hamas rockets have been capable of penetrating only about 30
miles into Israel, short of its major urban centres.
Hopes for a diplomatic solution to Iran's nuclear ambitions, which threaten
to destabilise the entire region, received a blow this week when the country's
Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, said that negotiating with the US would
be naive.
Israel has been relentless in trying to track down weapons heading to
Hezbollah and Palestinian militant groups. In January this year Israeli
warplanes destroyed a convoy of arms in Sudan heading for Egypt, an apparent
attempt by Hamas to restock its arsenal after the devastating Israeli
onslaught in Gaza. There were also unconfirmed media reports that Israeli
agents hijacked a Russian freighter, the Arctic Sea, this summer, because it
was allegedly shipping anti-aircraft and cruise missiles to Iran.
"There is a redoubling of efforts from Iran to destabilise the region," Mr
Ayalon said. Israeli military analysts say that Iran has ordered Hezbollah
not to provoke any conflict across Israel's northern border, which has been
largely calm since the month-long war ended in August 2006, preferring
instead to rebuild its ally's arsenal and use it as a deterrent to any
possible Israeli or US strike on its nuclear processing facilities. |
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