Blaming Iran, security officials said to back response to blast on Israeli ship
Israeli security officials view the attack on an Israeli-owned ship in the Persian Gulf on Friday as a crossing of a red line on the part of Iran, and support an Israeli response, according to a report Saturday.
Kan News said Israel unequivocally believes Tehran was
behind the explosion, and high-level discussions on the matter are expected to
take place Sunday.
“We are considering an appropriate response,” senior
officials told Ynet. “This will not be accepted silently.”
In an interview Saturday, Defense Minister Benny Gantz told
Kan there is “a likelihood” that Iran is behind the explosion.
The cargo ship MV Helios Ray anchored in Dubai on Saturday
morning. The blast did not disable the ship or injure its crew, but forced it
ashore for repairs.
In an interview with Kan News, Gantz said that the proximity
between the location of the incident and the Islamic Republic raised concerns
that it was responsible for the attack, but added that a probe had not yet been
completed.
“We need to continue investigating,” he stressed. “The
Iranians are looking to harm Israelis and Israeli infrastructure. The proximity
to Iran leads to the assessment that there is a likelihood that this is an
Iranian initiative. We are committed to continuing to check.”
Channel 13 News reported that security officials believed
the attack was carried out by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, who fired two
missiles at the ship.
Iranian media documented the damage to the ship in a
television report.
The report said Israeli and US teams were expected to arrive
on the ship to investigate the explosion in the coming days.
The area of the blast, off Iran’s coast at the entrance to
the Persian Gulf, saw a series of explosions targeting ships in 2019 that the
US Navy blamed on Iran, against the backdrop of sword-rattling between the
countries’ leaders. Tehran had denied the accusations, which came after Trump
abandoned Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and reimposed harsh
sanctions on the country.
A maritime risk intelligence company with a UK address and
number, Ambrey Intelligence, on Friday tweeted a compilation of pictures said
to be of the damage to the vessel. The veracity of the photos could not be
confirmed.
Aurora Intel, a network that says it provides news and
updates based on open-source intelligence on Twitter, also posted photos it
says were from the damaged ship.
The Friday explosion came amid high tensions between Iran
and the new US administration, which took its first military action Thursday
night against Iranian-backed militia in Syria in response to attacks on US
forces in the Middle East.
There were conflicting reports on whether Iran would have
known the ship was Israeli-owned.
Haaretz and Channel 13 said in unsourced reports that Iran
knew the ship was Israeli, but the ship’s owner and other reports said it was
unlikely.
Dryad Global, a maritime intelligence firm, said it was very
possible the blast stemmed from “asymmetric activity by Iranian military.”
As Iran seeks to pressure the United States to lift
sanctions, the country may seek “to exercise forceful diplomacy through
military means,” Dryad reported.
In recent weeks, as the administration of US President Joe
Biden looked to re-engage with Iran, Tehran has escalated its breaches of the
nuclear accord to create leverage over Washington. The deal saw Tehran agree to
limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of crippling
sanctions.
Iran also has blamed Israel for a recent series of attacks,
including a mysterious explosion last summer that destroyed an advanced
centrifuge assembly plant at its Natanz nuclear facility and the killing of
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a top Iranian scientist who founded the Islamic Republic’s
military nuclear program two decades ago.
A United Nations ship database identified the vessel’s
owners as a Tel Aviv-based firm called Ray Shipping Ltd.
Abraham Ungar, 74, who goes by “Rami,” is the founder of Ray
Shipping Ltd., and is known as one of the richest men in Israel. He made his
fortune in shipping and construction. Hebrew media reported that Ungar is close
to Yossi Cohen, head of the Mossad spy agency.
Ungar said he did not know exactly what had hit the vessel,
but said it was most likely “missiles or a mine placed on the bow.”
“Israeli authorities will investigate this together with
me,” he told the Ynet news site. “I don’t think this deliberately targeted an
Israeli-owned ship. That has not happened to me before.”
Ungar said it was most likely linked to previous attacks on
shipping in the area.
“I think it is part of the game between Iran and the US,
that’s why they are hitting Western ships,” he said.
Ungar told Channel 13, “The crew heard an explosion. There
was a blast, there’s a hole, there’s damage. There will be a check when the
ship reaches port.”
He said the holes in the side of the ship were around 1.5
meters (yards) in diameter.
While details of the explosion remained unclear, two
American defense officials told AP that the ship had sustained two holes on its
port side and two holes on its starboard side just above the waterline in the
blast. The officials said it remained unclear what caused the holes. They spoke
to the AP on condition of anonymity to discuss unreleased information on the
incidents.
The explosion on Friday recalled the summer of 2019, when
the US military blamed Iran for suspected attacks on two oil tankers near the
Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most strategically important shipping
lanes. In the preceding months, the US had attributed a series of suspected
attacks to Iran, including the use of limpet mines — designed to be attached
magnetically to a ship’s hull — to cripple four oil tankers off the nearby
Emirati port of Fujairah.
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