Israel Military Threat Against Iran Nuclear Programme Not A Bluff, Says Minister Danny Ayalon | World News | Sky News.

12:16pm UK, Friday November 06, 2009

Dominic Waghorn, Middle East correspondent

Israel’s threat of military action against Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programme is not a bluff, the country’s deputy foreign minister has told Sky News.

A suspected uranium enrichment facility southwest of Tehran

 

Danny Ayalon issued the warning in the same week America and the UN called on the Islamic Republic to swiftly accept an offer from Western nations to export its uranium and have it processed abroad.

“The one who’s bluffing is Iran, which is trying to play with cards they don’t have,” he said.

“All the bravado that we see and the testing and the very dangerous and harsh rhetoric is hiding a lot of weaknesses.”

 

Israel’s Danny Ayalon

Mr Ayalon accused Iran of stalling tactics, saying: “If Iranian behaviour and conduct continues as they have exhibited so far, it is obvious that their intentions are only to buy time and procrastinate.”

The minister also refused to rule out the use of military options by Israel or other nations against Iran if other measures fail.

Israel and America do not accept Tehran’s claims its nuclear programme is only for civilian purposes.

Israeli analysts say the country is finalising its plans to attack Iran if necessary.

Dr Ronen Bergman, author of The Secret War With Iran, said if current trends continue, an Israeli strike will be inevitable.

“If history continues on its current path – yes, at the end of the day, Israel will attack,” he said.

“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.”

 

I believe the option is viable and is ready. In other words, the question today for Israel is not a can or can’t we, but it’s a question on a political level of should we or shouldn’t we?

Israeli defence analyst Yaakov Katz

The challenges of carrying out such a strike 1,000 miles from home against well-defended, deeply-buried nuclear facilities are considerable.

But so are the risks – Israel could expect a counter attack from Iranian allies, Hizbollah and Hamas, and terrorist attacks worldwide.

It would incur the wrath of America and the condemnation of European allies.

It would also risk handing Iran the moral high ground and giving the Islamic Republic an excuse for pursuing the bomb in earnest.

But observers in the Middle East believe all those considerations are secondary to the Israeli government’s top priority.

“Israel is a tiny country. Israel cannot even sustain even one nuclear blast,” said Dr Bergman.

“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.”

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AEI – Should Israel Attack Iran?.

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Iran’s nuclear weapons development continues apace, threatening the security of its neighbors and the international community. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, more than 60 percent of the American public believes preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons warrants military action. Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Daniel Ayalon, emphasized on September 21 that Israel has “not taken any option off the table” when it comes to countering the Iranian threat. The same day, Israel’s top general, chief of staff Lieutenant General Gabi Ashkenazi, made it clear that he would not rule out a military strike on Iran’s nuclear installations, repeating that “Israel has the right to defend itself and all options are on the table.” As the debate intensifies over how to respond most effectively to Iran’s provocations, it is timely to explore the strategic and legal parameters of a potential Israeli strike against the Islamic Republic and provide some thorough analysis about implications for the United States.

The speakers in Panel I will consider the international legal aspects of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear installations. What treaties are relevant? How might Iran retaliate against Israel, the United States, or other countries? Would an Israeli attack violate international law? Or would it be legitimate self-defense? Eric Posner of the University of Chicago Law School, Gregory E. Maggs of George Washington University Law School, and Edwin D. Williamson of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP will discuss these and other legal considerations. AEI visiting scholar John Yoo will moderate.

The speakers in Panel II will consider strategy and policy. What role will the United States play in supporting its ally Israel? Can military action taken by Israel effectively deter Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons? AEI senior fellow John R. Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; the Brookings Institution’s Martin Indyk, former ambassador to Israel; and AEI resident scholar Michael Rubin will discuss these strategic policy questions. AEI’s vice president for foreign and defense policy studies, Danielle Pletka, will moderate.

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JERUSALEM — Israel’s prime minister charged Thursday that Iran’s goal was to kill as many civilians as possible by giving Hezbollah what the military said were enough weapons to extend any war against Israel for one month.Benjamin Netanyahu said the shipment of hundreds of tons of weapons on a seized ship Israel contends was bound for the Lebanese guerrilla group was a war crime that should be investigated by the U.N. Security Council. The Iran-backed Hezbollah denied that the arms were bound for them.

“Their goal was … to kill as many civilians as possible,” Netanyahu said of the Iranians.

Israeli naval commandos intercepted the ship Wednesday in waters off Cyprus and discovered hundreds of crates of rockets, missiles, mortars, anti-tank weapons and munitions. Israel claims the weapons came from Iran and were headed for Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon but have not yet provided any proof.Israeli officials hoped the capture of the ship would help buttress the Jewish state as it fights war crimes allegations at the United Nations on Thursday and seeks crippling global sanctions against Iran.

“This is a war crime that the General Assembly that is meeting today should investigate and discuss. It is a war crime that the U.N. Security Council should have a special meeting over,” Netanyahu told reporters in Tel Aviv.”It explicitly violates U.N. Security Council decisions,” Netanyahu added. “It is a war crime that we know the Iranian regime intended for the Hezbollah to carry out after they already fired thousands of rockets at our communities. This is what the international community should focus on especially today.”

But in the Muslim world, officials worried that Israel might use the seizure to divert attention from urgent regional issues. State-run Iran TV said in a commentary that the “Israeli propaganda” was aimed at diverting attention from allegations of Israeli war crimes during last winter’s war in the Gaza Strip. A Syrian Foreign Ministry official expressed the same view. Iran’s English-language Press TV said Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki dismissed the allegations on the cargo’s destination and route. Palestinians worried that Israel would pounce on an excuse to avoid peacemaking.

“Since the Israeli leadership and society are not ready for peace, they are using any pretext to shun peace obligations, and one is the issue of the Iranian shipment,” said Ghassan Khatib, a spokesman for the West Bank-based Palestinian government. Hezbollah on Thursday denied the weapons were for them.  There was no comment from Lebanese officials.” Hezbollah categorically denies it has any connection with the weapons which the Zionist enemy claims it seized aboard the Francop ship,” Hezbollah said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press in Beirut.

The arms shipment underscored the dangerous tensions between Israel and the Islamic Republic. Israel considers Iran a strategic threat because of its nuclear program and long-range missile development, and says Tehran is lying when it denies it is building atomic arms.  Iran has never acknowledged giving weapons to Hezbollah, which fought a monthlong war with Israel in 2006. Proof of large-scale Iranian weapons shipments to its proxy forces on Israel’s borders could reinforce Israeli demands for tough action — possibly even a pre-emptive strike — against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israeli defense officials said the weapons haul consisted of arms already in Hezbollah’s possession, and would have given the Lebanese guerrilla group the ability to fight a full month longer in the event of a clash with Israel on the scale of the 2006 war. The defense officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the military has yet to formally comment on the potential value of the shipment’s contents to militants.

The presence of Iranian proxies in the Mideast, combined with worries over Tehran’s nuclear program and arsenal of long-range missiles, have made Iran the Jewish state’s most formidable foe. Neutralizing Iran’s bomb-making ability remains Netanyahu’s top priority — and Israel has not ruled out a military strike against Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

Iran tested advanced nuclear warhead design – secret report | World news | The Guardian.

Exclusive: Watchdog fears Tehran has key component to put bombs in missiles

Short-range missile Zelzal is test launched during war games in Iran. Photograph: Shaigan/AFP/Getty Images

The UN’s nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, the Guardian has learned.

The very existence of the technology, known as a “two-point implosion” device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as “breathtaking” and has added urgency to the effort to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.

The sophisticated technology, once mastered, allows for the production of smaller and simpler warheads than older models. It reduces the diameter of a warhead and makes it easier to put a nuclear warhead on a missile.

Documentation referring to experiments testing a two-point detonation design are part of the evidence of nuclear weaponisation gathered by the IAEA and presented to Iran for its response.

The dossier, titled “Possible Military Dimensions of Iran’s Nuclear Program”, is drawn in part from reports submitted to it by western intelligence agencies.

The agency has in the past treated such reports with scepticism, particularly after the Iraq war. But its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, has said the evidence of Iranian weaponisation “appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, appears to be generally consistent, and is sufficiently comprehensive and detailed that it needs to be addressed by Iran”.

Extracts from the dossier have been published previously, but it was not previously known that it included documentation on such an advanced warhead. “It is breathtaking that Iran could be working on this sort of material,” said a European government adviser on nuclear issues.

James Acton, a British nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said: “It’s remarkable that, before perfecting step one, they are going straight to step four or five … To start with more sophisticated designs speaks of level of technical ambition that is surprising.”

Another western specialist with extensive knowledge of the Iranian programme said: “It raises the question of who supplied this to them. Did AQ Khan [a Pakistani scientist who confessed in 2004 to running a nuclear smuggling ring] have access to this, or is it another player?”

The revelation of the documents comes at a time of growing tension. Tehran has so far rejected a deal that would remove most of its enriched uranium stockpile for a year and replace it with nuclear fuel rods which would be much harder to turn into weapons. The Iranian government has also balked at negotiations, which were due to begin last week, over its continued enrichment of uranium, in defiance of UN security council resolutions.

There are fears in Washington and London that if no deal is reached to at least temporarily defuse tensions by the end of December, Israel could set in motion plans to take military action aimed at setting back the Iranian programme by force, with incalculable consequences for the Middle East.

Iran has rejected most of the IAEA material on weaponisation as forgeries, but has admitted carrying out tests on multiple high-explosive detonations synchronised to within a microsecond. Tehran has told the agency that there is a civilian application for such tests, but has so far not provided any evidence for them.

Western weapons experts say there are no such civilian applications, but the use of co-ordinated detonations in nuclear warheads is well known. They compress the fissile core, or pit, of the warhead until it reaches critical mass.

A US national intelligence estimate two years ago said that Iran had explored nuclear warhead design for several years but had probably stopped in 2003. British, French and German officials have said they believe weaponisation continued after that date and may still be continuing.

In September, a German court found a German-Iranian businessman, Mohsen Vanaki, guilty of brokering the sale of dual-use equipment with possible applications in developing nuclear weapons. The equipment included specialised high-speed cameras, of the sort used to develop implosion devices, as well as radiation detectors. According to a report by the Institute for Science and International Security, the German foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, testified at the trial that there was evidence that Iran’s weapons development was continuing.

The IAEA is seeking to find out what the scientists and the institutions involved in the experiments are doing now, but has so far not been given a response. The agency’s repeated requests to interview Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, whose name features heavily in the IAEA’s documentation and who is widely seen as the father of the Iranian nuclear programme, have been turned down.

The agency has also asked Iran to explain evidence that a Russian weapons expert helped Iranian technicians to master synchronised high-explosive detonations.

The first implosion devices, like the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, used 32 high-explosive hexagons and pentagons arrayed around a plutonium core like the panels of a football. The IAEA has a five-page document describing experimentation on such a hemispherical array of explosives.

According to a diplomat familiar with the IAEA documentation, the evidence also points to experiments with a two-point detonation system that represents “a more elegant solution” to the challenges of making a nuclear warhead, but it is much harder to achieve. It is used in conjunction with a non-spherical pit, in the shape of a rugby ball, or explosives in that shape wrapped around a spherical pit, and it works by compressing the pit from both ends.The IAEA has expressed “serious concern” about Iran’s failure to give an account of the research its scientists have carried out.

Descriptions of “two-point implosion” warheads designs have occasionally appeared in the public domain (there are extensive descriptions on Wikipedia) and they were first developed by US scientists in the 1950s, but it remains an offence for American officials or even non-governmental nuclear experts with se

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.