The Israeli navy has announced that it has intercepted a ship carrying a clandestine shipment of weapons for Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. The ship has been taken by the Israelis to the Israeli port of Ashdod and its cargo is being fully inspected. Already “hundreds of tons of weapons” have been discovered in “the largest arms shipment Israel has ever commandeered.” While that is an encouraging development, an Israeli9 naval official stated that the weapons seized are a “drop in the ocean” compared to the overall amount of weaponry shipped by Iran to its Hezbollah proxies. A photo of the seized ship tied up in the Israeli port of Ashdod is in the second link below.
Syria appears to be complicit in this shipment of arms. That would hardly be a surprise given that Syria is Iran’s ally and sometimes acts like an Iranian proxy state itself. What is surprising is that the first link below (from FOX News) reports that this ship loaded its smuggled weapons for Hezbollah in Egypt. If true, this would indicate that either Egypt has little control over its commercial port traffic or some port officials were induced to “turn a blind eye” to what was happening. The ability of the Israelis to know what was going on confirms that the Mossad is still a very formidable intelligence force, and that it has sources of information inside the Iranian transit network that moves weapons to Hezbollah. There is a possibility that the ship’s crew did not know that they were carrying weapons bound for Hezbollah. If this is the case, it speaks volumes that the Mossad knows more about ships’ cargoes in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea than do the ships’ owners or crews.
Iran has said its wants to “wipe Israel off the map.” It appears that they intend to do it by any means possible. A nuclear attack is one way, but Iran is also encircling the Israelis with Iranian allies. Syria is an Iranian ally. Hezbollah, which rules southern Lebanon, is an Iranian non-state proxy force which has many thousands of rockets and missiles to fire at Israeli cities if a new war breaks out. Iran has also been smuggling weapons into Hamas in the Gaza Strip to make it another base for operations against Israel. We now know that heavier weapons are being smuggled into Gaza. The third link (from ABC News) reports that Hamas test-fired a large missile into the Mediterranean Sea which had sufficient range to hit Tel Aviv in a future war. You can be sure that if they test-fired this missile, Hamas has more such missiles in its arsenal to use in the future.
It seems evident that if the Israelis attack Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent a nuclear attack against Israeli targets, Iran is arming its proxy forces bordering Israel to unleash a new war against the Jewish state. This situation is growing steadily more serious. However, we should all remember that while biblical prophecies indicate major wars will occur at the end of this age involving Israeli territory, Zechariah 12:1-7 and 14:1-14 prophesy that God will not allow the Israeli nation to be destroyed in those wars. Jerusalem will survive and be the capital of the Millennium/Messianic Age (Zechariah 14:16-17).
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,571548,00.html?test=latestnews
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/israel-hamas-missile-strike-tel-aviv/story?id=8981530
