The Israel Defense Forces said Wednesday it intercepted an Iranian shipment of
"advanced" weapons bound for "terrorist organizations" operating in Gaza.
The Israeli navy stopped a
Panamanian-flagged civilian cargo ship and boarded the vessel, the IDF said.
The weapons found were identified
as Syrian-manufactured surface-to-surface rockets, IDF spokesman Lt. Col. Peter
Lerner said.
It was an Iranian shipment headed
for Gaza, the IDF said, citing intelligence. Iran offered no immediate comment
on the incident.
The boarding took place in
international waters about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) off the coast of
Eilat, Israel, between Sudan and Eritrea in the Red Sea, Lerner said.
Asked why Iran didn't try to send
its own missiles to Gaza, the IDF spokesman said Tehran was doing everything
possible to cover up its role in the shipment of weapons.
"The IDF will continue to operate
against the Iranian attempts to arm regional terrorist organizations, who intend
to continuously ignite our borders," Lerner said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu said the weapons shipment was organized by Iran.
"At a time when it is talking to
the major powers, Iran smiles and says all sorts of nice things, the same Iran
is sending deadly weapons to terrorist organizations and is doing so via a
ramified network of secret operations in order to send rockets, missiles and
other deadly weapons that will be used to harm innocent citizens," Netanyahu
said in a statement.
A spokesman for Gaza's interior
ministry said the Israeli action was merely a justification for an ongoing
blockade around Gaza.
"The Palestinian resistance is
not naive to send this amount of weapons through the sea while it is totally
under siege in the Gaza strip," spokesman Islam Shahwan said.
Earlier Wednesday, the IDF
reported that it stopped two suspects affiliated with Hezbollah from planting a
bomb near the Israel-Syria border.
Yemen, U.S. intercept ship with 'large cache of illegal arms'
No comments:
Post a Comment