Israel is ‘Accused’ of Targeting 12 Iranian-Linked Tankers

by Hugh Fitzgerald

A strangely-worded story appears in the Jerusalem Post today. That story, which reported on an item that had appeared earlier that day in the Wall Street Journal, is here: “Israel targeted some 12 tankers headed for Syria, US officials say -WSJ,” by Idan Zonshine, Jerusalem Post, March 12, 2021:

US and regional officials have accused Israel of targeting “at least a dozen” tankers bound for Syria and mostly carrying Iranian oil due to concerns that petroleum profits were funding extremists, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

The “US and regional officials ACCUSED Israel” of targeting vessels that were either Iranian or carrying Iranian cargo, both oil and weapons? Why “accused”? Wherefore “accused”? That misfit of a verb, is in the first line of the story, influencing the reader’s reception. That latest feat of Israel derring-do, managing to locate and target at least a dozen vessels that were either Iranian or carrying an Iranian cargo, should not have been cause for any accusation, but rather for admiration, for relief, for gratitude, and for hope that those unbelievably busy multi-tasking Israelis will be able to keep flummoxing the malevolent mullahs, and to keep reassuring their Arab allies, and the Americans, too, that the best-laid plans of the Islamic Republic, thanks to the IDF and Mossad, will continue to gang agley. How about a rewrite by the Jerusalem Post – or by the Wall Street Journal, if that is where that maladroit verb originated: “The US has acknowledged, in silent admiration, Israel’s role in preventing Iran from violating the American sanctions on oil sales, and in preventing Iranian weapons from reaching the terror group Hezbollah through Iran’s outposts in Syria.”

The detection of the vessels is not a simple task. The Iranians routinely take every kind of evasive action: They turn off their tracking systems to avoid detection. They use old rusty vessels that are harder to pick up on radar. They offload oil and other cargo from one ship to another. They declare false destinations for the ship and its cargo.

The report alleged that since 2019, Israel has been using naval weapons, including water mines, to strike vessels which were either Iranian, or carried Iranian cargo, as they made their way to Syria.

“Alleged”? Is Israel a criminal in the dock? How about “claimed”?

The report said that while most of the tankers carried oil, some of the targeted vessels have made efforts to move other cargo, including weaponry.

Israel’s main goal is to prevent weaponry, especially precision-guided missiles, from reaching Iranian bases in Syria, for subsequent transfer to Hezbollah in Lebanon. But it also wants to interdict shipments of Iranian oil, for it is the revenue from such sales that helps pay for those weapons and, above all, for Iran’s nuclear program.

According to Greenpeace, Iranian oil tankers routinely violate trade embargoes on Iran and Syria to smuggle oil into Syria through the Suez Canal. The organization said that the practice of turning off tracking systems is also commonly done by such vessels, to avoid detection for violating the trade embargo.

The practice is so common in fact, that between August of 2018 and July of 2019, Syria received around 17 million barrels of crude oil from Iran this way.

The WSJ report added that other ways that these ships avoid international scrutiny is through the declaration of false destinations, transferal of oil from one ship to another at sea, or through the use of old, rusted tankers which are harder to detect….

Let’s refresh our memories about all that Israel has accomplished for itself, for its allies, and for the world. We’ve all heard of Stuxnet, the computer worm that in 2010 (or perhaps even earlier) Israel introduced into Iranian computers controlling Iran’s cascades of centrifuges; they caused the centrifuges to spin so fast they destroyed themselves. We know about the four Iranian nuclear scientists who were assassinated, picked off, one after the other, between 2010 and 2012, by Mossad agents on motorcycles who pulled up beside their cars, took their deadly shots, and drove off, weaving in and out of Tehran traffic, never to be caught. We know about how Mossad agents managed to locate, in an unprepossessing warehouse in a rundown section of Tehran, Iran’s nuclear archive. In the middle of the night, with exactly six hours to complete their task, they blasted their way through 32 steel doors, grabbed more than 100,000 documents, and made off with them, somehow getting them out of the country and back to Israel, where Iran’s entire nuclear archive was studied, and Israel then provided the IAEA with evidence of just how much Iran had been concealing about its nuclear program, including sites that until then were completely unknown to the IAEA inspectors. We know about the sabotage carried out by Mossad that destroyed, from inside the structure, the advanced centrifuge plant at Natanz. And we know, too, about the killing, on a road just outside Tehran, of the nuclear program’s scientific mastermind, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

But until now we have heard little about Israel’s interdiction of Iranian oil and Iranian weapons in the Mediterranean. We had been looking only at the Persian Gulf for signs of Israel’s naval activity. Recently we learned about the Helios Ray, the Israeli-owned car-carrier vessel that Iran recently attacked in the Gulf of Oman, with an explosion carefully calibrated not to cause major damage, nor to result in casualties, but to send a message to the Jewish state – on the high seas, we Iranians can give as good as we get. Israel, fortunately, knows that isn’t true.

First published in Jihad Watch.