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.

Arms and Iran

• A hijacked cargo ship allegedly carrying missiles bound for Iran was seized by the Russian navy off the coast of West Africa in September after a Mossad tip-off. The Arctic Sea had vanished en route from Finland to Algeria in July

• In February Israeli drones in Sudan attacked an arms convoy bound for Hamas in Gaza. Several Revolutionary Guards were killed

• Israeli forces boarded the container ship Karine A in the Red Sea in January 2002 to find 50 tonnes of arms. Israel claimed that the arms were bound for Yasser Arafat, the former Palestinian leader

• Belgian authorities discovered an Iranian ship containing advanced arms and explosives in Antwerp port in 1996. Shimon Peres claimed that the arms were intended for an attack on Israel and blamed four European countries for extending credit lines to Tehran

Source: Times database

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