OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — The sun was rising on the Mediterranean
one recent morning when the crew of an Iranian cargo ship heard an explosion.
The ship, the Shahr e Kord, was about 50 miles off the coast of Israel, and
from the bridge they saw a plume of smoke rising from one of the hundreds of
containers stacked on deck.
اضافة اعلان
The state-run Iranian shipping company said the vessel had
been heading to Spain and called the explosion a “terrorist act”.
But the attack on the Shahr e Kord this month was just one
of the latest salvos in a long-running covert conflict between Israel and Iran.
An Israeli official said the attack was retaliation for an Iranian assault on
an Israeli cargo ship last month.
Since 2019, Israel has been attacking ships carrying Iranian
oil and weapons through the eastern Mediterranean and Red Seas, opening a new
maritime front in a regional shadow war that had previously played out by land
and in the air.
Iran appears to have quietly responded with its own
clandestine attacks. The latest came Thursday afternoon, when an Israeli-owned
container ship, the Lori, was hit by an Iranian missile in the Arabian Sea, an
Israeli official said. No casualties or significant damage were reported.
The Israeli campaign, confirmed by American, Israeli, and
Iranian officials, has become a linchpin of Israel’s effort to curb Iran’s
military influence in the Middle East and stymie Iranian efforts to circumvent
US sanctions on its oil industry.
But the conflict’s expansion risks the escalation of what
has been a relatively limited tit-for-tat, and it further complicates efforts
by the Biden administration to persuade Iran to reintroduce limits on its
nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
“This is a full-fledged cold war that risks turning hot with
a single mistake,” said Ali Vaez, Iran program director at the International
Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research organization. “We’re still in an
escalatory spiral that risks getting out of control.”
Since 2019, Israeli commandos have attacked at least 10
ships carrying Iranian cargo, according to a US official and a former senior
Israeli official. The real number of targeted ships may be higher than 20,
according to an Iranian Oil Ministry official, an adviser to the ministry and an
oil trader.
The Israeli attacks were first reported by The Wall Street
Journal.
Most of the ships were carrying fuel from Iran to its ally
Syria, and two carried military equipment, according to an American official
and two senior Israeli officials. An American official and an Israeli official
said the Shahr e Kord was carrying military equipment toward Syria.
The Israeli government declined to comment.
The extent of Iran’s retaliation is unclear. Most of the
attacks are carried out clandestinely and with no public claims of
responsibility.
The long-running shadow war between Israel and Iran has
accelerated in recent years. Iran has been arming and financing militias
throughout the region, notably in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, the Gaza Strip and
Lebanon, where it supports Hezbollah, a Shiite militia and political movement
that is a longtime enemy of Israel.
Israel has tried to counter Iran’s power play by launching
regular airstrikes on Iranian shipments by land and air of arms and other cargo
to Syria and Lebanon. Those attacks have made those routes riskier and shifted
at least some of the weapons transit, and the conflict, to the sea, analysts
said.
The dynamic complicates already fraught efforts by the Biden
administration to reconstruct the 2015 nuclear deal that imposed limits on
Iran’s nuclear enrichment program in exchange for sanctions relief. Former
President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, reinstating those
sanctions and imposing a raft of new ones.
“It jacks up the political price that the Biden
administration would have to pay to provide the Iranians with any kind of
economic reprieve,” Vaez said. “If Iran is engaged in this kind of tit for tat
with Israel, while also putting pressure on American presence in the region, it
makes restoring the deal much more difficult.”
Israel’s leadership believes the previous nuclear deal was
insufficient and would like to scuttle any chance of resurrecting a similar
pact. An Israeli official said the attacks were part of a broader strategy to
strong-arm Tehran into agreeing to tougher and longer curbs on its nuclear
ambitions, as well as restrictions on its ballistic missile program and its
support for regional militias.
The Israeli offensive against Iranian shipping has two
goals, analysts and officials said. The first is to prevent Tehran from sending
equipment to Lebanon to help Hezbollah build a precision missile program, which
Israel considers a strategic threat.
The second is to dry up an important source of oil revenue
for Tehran, building on the pressure US sanctions have inflicted. After the
United States imposed sanctions on Iran’s fuel industry in late 2018, the
Iranian government became more reliant on clandestine shipping.
The effectiveness Israel’s campaign is unclear. Some of the
targeted ships were forced to return to Iran without delivering their cargo,
the US official said.
The Iranians associated with the Iranian Oil Ministry said
that in all cases the vessels sustained minor damage, the crews were not hurt
and repairs were conducted within a few days.
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