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Seized ship proves Iran’s investment of Israel’s border | Middle East Conflict.

The seizure by Israeli forces of an Iranian-commissioned arms smuggling ship on its way to Syria and/or Hizbullah in Lebanon offers a further glimpse into the daily, silent war under way between Israel and the Iranian-led regional bloc.

An Iranian rocket bound for Syria and Hizbullah discovered aboard the ‘Francop’.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimksi

SLIDESHOW: Israel & Region |  World

It is evidence of Iran’s ongoing strategy of arming its Islamist clients to Israel’s north and south.

The strength of these forces on the ground constitutes an important asset for the Iranian regime. Iranian aid and weaponry is not doled out for its recipients to use at will. Iran’s investment is likely to be called in at a moment of the Iranian regime’s choosing – most likely in the event of a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Iran makes use of all its regional assets and allies in its effort to supply arms to Hamas and Hizbullah. These two organizations play a vital role in Iran’s strategy for regional hegemony.

They currently maintain the two “hot” fronts in the Israeli-Arab conflict (which might today more accurately be referred to as the “Israel-Islamist” conflict). So maintaining the smooth flow of supplies is a strategic priority of the first order for Teheran.

In January, an Israeli bombing of an arms convoy in Sudan laid bare an arms trail leading from Iran to Sudan, across Egypt, across Sinai, and finishing in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

The Sudan-Sinai-Gaza part of the trail was created and administered by Hizbullah men, acting on behalf of their Iranian patron. In April, an unidentified warship sank an Iranian vessel carrying arms to the Gaza Strip, as it sought to dock in Sudan.

This latest seizure of the arms ship bound for Syria lays bare a similar collective effort by Iran’s allies to supply the parallel northern front – apparently along a similar route. The latest indications are that the ship docked first in Yemen, then in Sudan, before making its way to the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal.

But the destination of the arms ship – either a Syrian or a Lebanese port, according to sources – points to one of the essential differences in the two fronts maintained by Iran against Israel.

Hamas in Gaza is boxed in and lacks strategic depth. Egypt to its south is aligned with the pro-western bloc in the region, and as such is a partner (sometimes even an energetic partner) in Israeli efforts to stem the flow of weaponry to Gaza.

Syria, however, is a card-carrying member of the pro-Iranian regional bloc. The porousness of Lebanon’s eastern border with Syria is a vital asset for Hizbullah. And the Shi’ite Islamist movement has complete freedom of operation on Lebanese soil.

UN Resolution 1701 tasks UN forces in Lebanon with preventing the Syrian supply of arms across the border to Hizbullah. But no serious effort has been made to implement this clause.

Journalists working in Lebanon are aware that the crossings at the eastern border are off limits, and few attempt to report events there. Even UN investigators themselves concur that since August 2006, a steady supply of Iranian and Syrian arms has been making its way across Lebanon’s eastern border to the Hizbullah forces in the south of the country.

It may be assumed that this was the intended final destination for the arms found Tuesday night on the ship bearing the Antiguan flag.

The events of the last 18 months in Lebanon have indicated that Hizbullah is the de facto ruler of that country – in the simple sense of being the force that can impose its will on matters it considers vital without consulting with other elements.

Six months after the much-vaunted election victory of the pro-western March 14 movement, Lebanon still has no government in sight. In the meantime, the parallel pro-Iranian Hizbullah state pursues its policies unhindered.

If the ship turns out to have been bound for a Lebanese port – this will offer the latest indication of just how free Hizbullah’s hand in Lebanon now is.

The apprehending of the arms ship represents a propaganda coup for Israel, which may help it draw attention to the reality of an ongoing Iranian effort to amass powerful proxy military forces to Israel’s south and north.

However, it us unlikely to put a major dent in Iranian efforts to rearm Hizbullah. The evidence suggests that the process of replenishing the large-scale destruction suffered by Hizbullah in 2006 has been mostly trouble-free and has largely been completed. Hizbullah is thought by Israel to now possess around 80,000 rockets and missiles directed at the Jewish state.

The frenetic armament efforts undertaken by Iran and its clients do not mean that conflict is necessarily imminent. The Iranians were displeased at Hizbullah’s provocation that led to the war of 2006. The war destroyed costly resources and undid intensive Iranian efforts.

Rather, weaponry is making its way to south Lebanon and Gaza, via Syria, Sinai and the Mediterranean, to place the Israeli population within the range of Iranian-directed short and medium range missiles. The implicit threat is that these assets would be activated should Israel (or anyone else) dare to move against the Iranian nuclear program.

Israelis may take justified pride in its navy’s significant achievement in stopping the arms ship bound for Syria. But the result of the larger contest of which the ship was a part, however, still lies ahead.

The writer is senior research fellow at Global Research in
International Affairs Center, IDC, Herzliya

Target: Tel Aviv – by P. David Hornik | FrontPage Magazine.

Israel’s chief of Military Intelligence, Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin, addressed the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Tuesday. His tidings weren’t good.

Regarding Hamas, Yadlin said the Gaza-based terror group now has a rocket with a 60-kilometer range that can reach Tel Aviv, and has already successfully test-fired it into the Mediterranean Sea. He said Hamas had also smuggled in Iranian-produced Fajr-style rockets, and overall has a better rocket capability than before the Gaza War last winter.

Yadlin acknowledged that things have been relatively quiet lately, and attributed the reduced hostilities to Israeli deterrence as well as struggles within Gaza. The nineteen rockets fired into Israel from Gaza in October, he said, were fired by splinter groups that Hamas is trying to suppress. Hamas, however, sees itself as still building its capabilities, and the smuggling continues.

Regarding Hezbollah—relatively quiet since the 2006 Second Lebanon War just as Hamas has been quieter since the Gaza War—Yadlin said it, too, keeps bringing in weapons, and storing them south of the Litani River in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that formally put an end to the 2006 conflict.

And what of the two forces—UNIFIL and the Lebanese army—that 1701 envisaged as preventing Hezbollah’s rearmament? UNIFIL, Yadlin said, refrains from entering the civilian houses where Hezbollah stores most of the weapons, and the Lebanese army occasionally gives Hezbollah a helping hand with its buildup.

And where do the weapons come from? That Yadlin said they come from Syria and Iran is not new or surprising, though he emphasized that “Syria has turned into the main factory and weapons cache for Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as for Syria itself, with financial aid from Iran. Syria is operating on two parallel tracks—benevolence toward the West, and in its backyard it is becoming a weapons factory for the axis of evil.” The very next day the Israeli navy intercepted a major Iranian arms shipment that was supposed to reach Hezbollah via Syria.

And as for how the weapons get to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Yadlin said they were passing through Syria—again, not new—and also Turkey. That falls into line with Turkey’s recent trend of Islamization and alignment with the Iranian-led bloc, and is an ominous development.

And regarding Iran itself, Yadlin said its nuclear reactor in Qom has “no possible civilian use” despite Iranian claims and is designed for enriching uranium; that Iran remains unmoved by international pressures; that it is aiming for “horizontal expansion” of its nuclear capacity, meaning that when it wants to make a bomb it will be able to do so in the least possible time; and that Iran is not only responsible for financing, training, and arming Hamas and Hezbollah but is also “behind the flow of weapons to Sudan, Iraq…and anyplace else where a military conflict is raging.”

From Israel’s standpoint, then, the situation could be one of only very deceptive calm. Although, immediately after the Gaza War, there was much talk of an international effort to stop the weapons smuggling into Gaza and even an international summit ostensibly devoted to that purpose, by now such visions are more or less forgotten and Israel again faces Gaza alone in a lull, possibly, of some length but, clearly, of no real depth.

The relative passivity of both Hamas and Hezbollah could also reflect an Iranian preference to hold them in reserve—along with Syria—as part of a multipronged retaliation should Israel finally, at some point, attempt a strike on Iran’s nuclear program. The fact that—despite ongoing U.S. and European blandishments—Syria is, more than ever, an armory and transit point for anti-Western subversion reflects dispiritingly on the West’s invincible will to self-deception when it comes to Damascus.

As for Yadlin’s words on Tehran, while well heard in Israel, one cannot be sanguine about the Obama administration’s ability to hear them over the noise of misguided diplomatic activity and its need to believe in “engagement” with implacable evil.

San Francisco Sentinel » Blog Archives » ARMS SHIP SEIZURE JUST ANOTHER BATTLE IN THE SECRET WAR WITH IRAN.

4 November 2009

The ship and weapons were taken to an Israeli port.

BY YOSSI MELMAN
Haaretz

Analysis

The significance of Israel’s interception of a ship carrying hundreds of tons of weapons, which defense officials are saying were Iranian arms meant for Hezbollah, is not in the quantity or the quality of the weapons seized. The importance, as far as Israel is concerned, is that the Israel Navy, which has long viewed the Mediterranean Sea as “our sea”, is stepping up efforts to intercept cargo coming out of Iran.

Wednesday’s operation, in which Israeli forces seized the Antigua-flagged Francop and unloaded the largest arms shipment Israel has ever commandeered, is the latest in a long line of operations with a similar goal, some of which Israel took credit for, and some of which were attributed to Israel’s air force or navy. In fact, Israel is waging a secret war, which is sometimes not so secret, with Iran, against the backdrop of Iran’s constant efforts to arm the organizations it supports, especially Hezbollah and Hamas.

This war began far from Israel’s beaches, in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. In January, in the midst of the war in Gaza, an attack of a fleet of weapons-carrying ships sailing from Iran on its way to Gaza was attributed to the Israel Air Force, as were the sinking of several similar ships.

Israel’s daring, in terms of its actions against Iranian arms smuggling, is supported by an international diplomatic embrace, and intelligence. The diplomatic legitimacy and the legal justification for Israel’s actions stem from United Nations Security Council resolutions forbidding Iran from exporting weapons to Syria, to be transferred into the hands of Hezollah. Israel is acting with the full cooperation of international NATO forces that patrol the Indian Ocean, Red Sea and Mediterranean, in efforts to battle arms smuggling.

The international diplomatic support is manifested in Israel’s ability to pinpoint weapons shipments coming from Iran, in cooperation with American intelligence bodies and those of France and other countries acting toward the same goal. The commander of the Israel Navy, who gave a press conference Wednesday afternoon, said in his briefing that the ship was discovered as a result of routine patrols and observation ? these claims could merely be the navy’s way of explaining the fact that it had previous intelligence regarding the ship’s cargo which allowed them to carry out precise surveillance and intercept the ship. If in fact this is a case of previous intelligence, it demonstrates good intelligence capabilities, starting possibly from the ship’s point of origin in the port of Bandar Abbas in Iran, onto the Egyptian port which served as a transfer point for the delivery.

The method used to transfer the weapons indicates that Iran is under growing international pressure regarding its weapons shipments to Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah. This pressure stems form the Security Council resolutions that imposed international sanctions on Iran’s state-run shipping company as a result of Iran’s refusal to abandon its controversial nuclear program. The Iranians know that they can’t use Iranian ships to transport these weapons, so they tend to lease foreign ships, as was the case last month with a German ship, waving a German flag.

In this instance, in order to prevent surveillance, the Iranians used a ship that appeared to carry civilian cargo out of the Iranian port, headed for Egypt. The Iranians believed that it would be easier to conceal the arms shipment if they used the Egyptian port as the point of transfer, loading the ship with the weapons there, hoping that it wouldn’t be traced back to Iran. But they failed.

The 122 mm. rockets and 107 mm. Katyushas that were discovered aboard the ship are not impressive in themselves. In fact, the unimpressive cargo raises questions, because Hezbollah already has massive amounts of these weapons. The Iranians could have shipped these weapons in a simpler way ? fly them directly to Syria and then into Lebanon by land ? but they knew that Israel is aware of this smuggling route and has alerted the international community to its existence, and that the UN has issued several complaints to the Syrian government for violating UN resolutions. The only explanation can be that the Iranian effort involves the use of every available route, whether by land, air or sea, operating on the assumption that if some of the shipments are blocked, intercepted or seized, others will still arrive at the desired destination.

Israel shouldn’t congratulate itself too much for this success, because it is just another operation in a string of operations comprising an ongoing cat and mouse endeavor. The Iranians will continue to smuggle weapons to their proxies and Israel will continue trying to expose and intercept them.

WILL ISRAEL STRIKE IRAN? | Iran | Israel | nuclear | Middle East Blog | Sky News Blogs.

Dominic Waghorn November 04, 2009 1:29 PM

Is Israel in the advanced stages of preparing to attack Iran to destroy its alleged nuclear facilities?

I asked two of Israel’s leading journalists in the field of defence and security. This is an interview with Dr. Ronen Bergman author of ‘The Secret War with Iran’.

DW: Is apprehensive about the current diplomatic track and the current nuclear offer from western nations?

RB: Israel is convinced that this is a major achievement for the Iranians. Israel is convinced that Iran is determined to have the bomb, Iran is trying to reach it as soon as possible and Israel thinks that the present agreement and the engagement are lowering the economic pressure on Iran and therefore make it far more possible for it to continue. So from the Israeli point of view this is a major error of the west and paradoxically it makes the chances of an Israeli attack much much higher.

DW: But it would make it harder for Israel to carry out the attack in the sense that international opinion will be against Israel, won’t it?

RB: I always try to explain to non Israelis that they will not be able to understand Israelis or Israeli politicians and the Israeli decision making process without understanding how profound how deep is the memory of the holocaust in the overall character of the Israelis. AT the end of the day the first priority of the Israeli Prime Minister would not be American rage, European condemnation or Iranian retaliation, the first priority is that Israel, the Jewish people would never face another Holocaust. And therefore if the time comes when the Israeli Prime Minister receives information that Iran is on the verge of having a bomb I would suspect that he would have only one choice, one decision to make.

DW: Does the current Prime Minister have what it takes to make that decision?

RB: I think so and campaign slogans have a tendency to become reality and Prime Minister Netanyahu has made it his campaign slogan. Not on my shift. Iran will not become a nuclear military state. I believe that even if Iran becomes a military nuclear superpower it does mean the end of Israel but it surely means the end of the political career of Benjamin Netanyahu and he understands that as well.

DW: Does the Israeli military believe it’s capable of knocking out Iran’s nuclear military potential.

RB: No, nobody is talking about the full destruction of the project. Everyone is talking about the delay and now the calculation is how long and what’s the price. The Israeli military, the Israeli Air Force, the Israeli intelligence community is all preparing for a possible strike. Theoretically even if tomorrow the prime minister orders the strike the plans are ready the planes are ready the pilots have been practising this for a very long time. It can be commenced tomorrow. The assessment is that a successful attack would result in a delay of three to four years. Is it enough, of course not, but the hope in Israel is that with such a delay, at the end of the day, the regime would collapse before they close the gap. The overall assessment is that Israel knows enough about the Iranian attempts to hide the facilities from the international community so it is able to destroy facilities that Iranians are convinced are not going to be hit in such at attack.

DW: Do you personally think it will happen?

RB: If history continues on its current path, yes. AT the end of the day, Israel will attack. The Iranians have expressed no willingness to stop the project. They see it as a necessity as an insurance policy for the regime to have the bomb. They don’t want to bomb Israel but Israel on the other hand still adopting the Begin doctrine, saying that Israel would never tolerate the existence of an atomic bomb in the hands of a country that calls for its destruction.

DW: The problem is that if they do strike it only puts it back three years but gives Iran the ability to say, well we weren’t building the bomb but we are now because of what just happened to us and then they will have much of the world’s opinion on their side. It could be totally counterproductive for Israel.

RB: And I could add numerous calculations and motivations why not to attack. It would unite the Iranian people behind the regime. It will ignite a series of terrorist bombings throughout the world against Israel. It will raise oil prices. It would create rage from the Oval Office, but the first reason why such an attack would occur is that the Israeli Prime Minister would never accept the existence of non conventional warfare, of an atomic bomb in the hands of a country like Iran.

DW: Can you explain that fear and the fear Israelis have about this to an audience in the UK to help them understand how they feel about it here?

RB: The first prime minister of Israel David Ben Gurion used to say “My worst nightmare is that I brought the survivors of the holocaust to Israel and their sons and daughters would face another holocaust. The fear of extinction, the existential threat is profound to anything happening in Israel, any sort of decision any sort of thinking any sort of mindset derives from the holocaust. And when Ahmedinejad is talking about the destruction of Israel and trying to have the bomb this immediately translates in the minds of Israelis into what Hitler used to say and what Hitler did. Israel is a tiny country. Israel cannot even sustain even one nuclear blast. Therefore from the Israeli point of view the only way to combat it is not by a balance of deterrence but by preventing the other side from having it in the first place.