Israelis 'seize Iran arms ship'

  
"We found dozens of containers, with hundreds of tonnes of arms bound for Hezbollah from Iran," deputy naval commander Rani Ben Yehuda told reporters.
  
The shipment was among the largest ever seized by Israel, dwarfing the 50 tonnes of weapons found aboard the Karine A seized in 2002 on its way to Gaza, which dealt a major blow to relations between the Palestinians and Washington.
  
At Ashdod port, soldiers pulled hundreds of olive-green ammunition crates  from the shipping containers, many of them surrounded by sacks of cement meant to disguise the contents.
  
They were then divided into huge stacks of rockets of various sizes, mortar shells, hand grenades and ammunition for AK-47 rifles. Many of the weapons crates had inscriptions in Spanish, Chinese and English.
  
No anti-aircraft or anti-tank missiles have been found on the ship, Ben-Yehuda said, but he added that soldiers were still unpacking containers.
  
The military had earlier announced that it had seized the 137-metre (450-foot) Antigua-flagged vessel "Francop" before dawn around 100 nautical miles from the Israeli coast.
  
Ben Yehuda said the captain of the ship was unaware of the contents of his cargo and had agreed to allow Israeli forces to board and inspect his ship.
  
He said the cargo manifest for the seized crates indicated they were headed from Iran to Syria, but Israel offered no direct proof to implicate Iran or Hezbollah, and the Lebanese group declined to comment on the incident.
  
Israel views Iran as its main strategic threat because of Tehran's support for regional militant groups, its nuclear enrichment programme and its leaders' repeated predictions of the demise of the Jewish state.
  
Defence Minister Ehud Barak hailed the operation, calling it a "new success in our struggle against weapons smuggling aimed at reinforcing terrorist organisations that are threatening the security of Israel."
  
His remarks were carried in a defence ministry statement that said the ship was captured "near Cyprus," without elaborating on whether it was in Cypriot or international waters at the time.
  
Israel's Haaretz newspaper reported that the ship set out from Iran and later docked in Yemen and Sudan before passing through the Suez Canal en route to either Syria or Lebanon.
  
Israel has long accused arch-foes Syria and Iran of supplying weapons to Hezbollah and to Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, which has been ruled by the Islamist Hamas movement since June 2007.
  
On Tuesday, a senior Israeli general warned that Hamas had successfully test-fired out to sea a rocket that was capable of reaching Tel Aviv from Gaza.
  
The rocket, believed to be Iranian-made, has a range of about 60 kilometres (40 miles), putting Israel's major population centres in range, said Major General Amos Yadlin, head of military intelligence.
  
Hamas called the claim a "fabrication" designed to mobilise world opinion against the Islamist group before the UN General Assembly, which was on Wednesday due to discuss a report on the Gaza war that was deeply critical of both Israel and Hamas.
  
Israel has in the past seized shipments of weapons allegedly bound for Gaza, and on January 3, 2002, at the height of a Palestinian uprising, Israel intercepted the Karine A in the Red Sea where it was bound for Gaza.
  
The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat admitted responsibility for the smuggling attempt, and the affair eroded his standing with Washington.