JERUSALEM – Israeli naval forces say a ship boarded Wednesday from Iran was heading to Gaza with advanced rockets to turn the territory into a much greater terror threat to Israel and others.
Iran has already provided the anti-Israel terror group Hezbollah tens of thousands of missiles in southern Lebanon despite the presence of U.N. peacekeepers there, said Israeli military analysts.
The shipment intercepted by Israeli naval commandos Wednesday in the Red Sea, more than 1,000 miles from Israel, was carrying Syrian-made M-302 rockets with a range of up to 125 miles and would have significantly improved the capabilities of Gaza terrorists to put nearly all of Israel in their range.
Arieh Herzog, former director of the Israeli Ministry of Defense section responsible for the development and deployment of the country’s missile defense system, said the Syian missiles would have been a “game-changer.”
“It’s a missile that’s significantly longer range than they have now in Gaza, with a bigger warhead. If you draw a circle 200 kilometers long, it could hit Haifa and, of course, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem” in the country’s center, he said.
With a warhead that large, “the damage could be significant, and Israel needs to do everything it can to stop it,” Herzog said.
Gaza, a small strip of land bordering Israel, is controlled by Hamas, a Islamist terror group whose aims has been to destroy Israel. Previously, Hamas has only been able to reach about 50 miles into Israel with its homegrown M-75 missiles.
The Red Sea operation by Israel followed months of intelligence gathering, military spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said. Lerner said the shipment originated in Syria and was flown to Iran and shipped to Iraq to “obscure their tracks.”
From there, the missiles were loaded inside concrete pipes aboard a Panamanian-flagged ship bound for Sudan, from where the weapons were to be driven through Egypt to Gaza, the army said. Israel stopped the ship off the Sudanese-Eritrean border.
Lerner said the 17 crew members of the ship were probably unaware of the cargo.
Herzog believes Iran’s aim is to help launch a two-front assault on Israel, from Hezbollah to Israel’s north and Hamas to its south.
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