Presenting: The New 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."
"[It 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. This is the true Iran and this state cannot possess nuclear weapons."
Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu

"It has once again become clear that Iran continues to be the greatest exporter of terror in the world, with the express purpose of destabilizing the Middle East."
Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon

IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant Benny Gantz gives a press conference at the Defence Ministery in Tel Aviv, on March 5, 2014, as he briefs the press on events in the Red Sea. Photo by AFP

 

Those are the warning shots. Repeated ad infinitum. They are just as repeatedly ignored. Not that there is any lack of evidence. Just that no one seems quite interested. And this is typical. Because it is Israel to which the international community turns one ear that is deaf and the other ear that simply couldn't care less.

The slaughter taking place in Syria is one little bit of literal evidence with Iran's Al-Quds Revolutionary Guards helping plan attacks against Syrian Sunni civilians and the Republic sending its proxy Hezbollah to do the heavy lifting that the regime's military cannot quite manage on its own.

Hamas, long supported by Iran in its mission to destroy Israel has placed itself in the black books of ingrates for its protests over the plight of Palestinians trapped within the Yarmouk refugee camp, once their home away from home, now an utterly mangled place of ruination, despair and starvation forced upon Sunnis within Syria, as perceived supporters of the Sunni-led rebellion against the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Iran's often repeated, very publicly uttered threats against the State of Israel, its message that Israel is to be eliminated from the Middle East sooner rather than later, and even sooner than that once the Republic's goal of achieving nuclear tipped rocketry becomes reality, should certainly present as evidence that the country ranks in the stratosphere as the most viciously disruptive, deadly-threatening state in the world. But since it is Israel that is seen in Iran's cross-hairs no alarm is raised.

Israel, needless to say, begs to differ. And takes it upon herself to do what it must to ensure its survival, the security of its people and its longevity well into the future as a Jewish state whose intention is to remain where its ancestral homeland and history located it, the reincarnation of its presence established with the consent of an international community in 1948, now bored with the constant denials of Middle East nations to accept a Jewish state in its midst.

And so, Israel, in using all means at its disposal, continues to interdict whenever it is able to, ever more sophisticated weapons that trickle and sometimes flood into the hands of those adversaries whose raison de'etre remains its destruction. Intercepting arms shipments when its intelligence services becomes aware, whether by land transport or by ships carrying the means by which that goal could be achieved to the militias meaning to use them, courtesy of the sources that build, pay for, and convey them.

 

The Klos C enters the Eilat Port on March 8, 2014. Photo by Tomer Appelbaum

The Israeli naval commandos who boarded a civilian ship in the southern Red Sea on Wednesday interrupted just such a mission, when it took command of the Klos-C, a ship whose captain and crew were Turks who expressed complete ignorance of the contraband weapons they were conveying, concealed under innocent civilian cargo, flying a Panamanian flag. The shipment of Syrian-made M-302 rockets, with a range of 160 km was seized in international waters between Eritrea and Sudan.

Unlike an earlier Turkish-manned ship, the Mavi Marmora, meant to crush the Gaza blockade in which nine Turkish Islamists were killed who had attacked the IDF commandos on that occasion, no one was injured in this operation. This time a joint intelligence operation between Israel and the United States tracked the ship for months from the time the weapons were loaded onto a plane in Damascus, flown to Tehran, trucked to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, then shipped to Iraq.

Map showing where the ship was seized.

 

In Umm Qasr, Iraq, the vessel was loaded with cement, setting sail on the last leg of its journey to Port Sudan. Sudan has on previous occasions helpfully lent itself to such missions in tandem with the Islamic Republic of Iran. And this was not the first shipment of deadly munitions that Israel's intelligence and military had tracked and destroyed, travelling by way of Sudan to help arm Hezbollah and Hamas.

This shipment, it was speculated, was an indication that Iran had surmounted its irritation with Hamas, meaning to provide it with advanced rocketry. Lt. Col. Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, said the rockets uncovered on the Klos-C "do not exist in Gaza today"; their long range capabilities would have placed millions of Israelis in danger. The shipment could have been meant not for Hamas but for the use of the Muslim Brotherhood Islamists.

Israeli naval commandos inspecting wooden carts containing Syrian made M-302 rockets loaded on the KLOS-C at the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. the rockets were later covered with another cargo of cement, loaded at the Iraqi port of Um Qasr. The destination of the cargo was Port Sudan in the Red Sea. Photo: IDF

All dedicated to the elimination of Israel from its place in the Middle East. All supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Qatar and Turkey itself might very well have played no small role in this latest attempt to arm Israel's enemies with weapons meant to give them a superior edge in the battle for Israel's existence.