THE Israeli navy yesterday seized a ship carrying an estimated 500 tonnes of what defence officials said were Iranian-supplied weapons bound for Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.
Officials said the weapons included rockets that could be used in the event of renewed Israeli-Hezbollah hostilities.
"It's a cargo certificate that shows that it was from a port in Iran," said military spokeswoman Lieutenant Colonel Avital Leibo
vich.
Israeli vessels in the Mediterranean stopped the ship, the Francop, a commercial vessel flying an Antiguan flag, in international waters 100 miles west of the Israeli coast and searched its cargo, army officials said. After discovering weapons concealed in containers, they brought it to the Israeli port of Ashdod, where troops began unpacking it.
Defence minister Ehud Barak said the seizure stopped the weapons from going to "the northern sphere of terrorism", a reference to Hezbollah, which fought the Israeli army in 2006.
The Lebanese fundamentalist group declined to comment yesterday on the seizure, while Syria denied the boat was carrying Iranian weapons to Syria, which Israel alleges supplies Hezbollah with weaponry.
Israel sees both Hezbollah and the Palestinian Muslim fundamentalist Hamas movement primarily as proxies Tehran uses to wage indirect war against the Jewish state.
