Israel suspected of bombing Sudan arms convoy headed for GazaBy James Hider in Jerusalem
The Times, March 27, 2009
Israeli jets carried out a long-range bombing mission against a convoy in
Sudan that was suspected of bringing arms from Iran to Hamas in the Gaza Strip,
it emerged yesterday.
Sudan confirmed that an illegal arms convoy was destroyed by an airstrike
near the Egyptian border at the height of the war in Gaza in January. It
declined to identify which country had launched the attack.
The American news network CBS, citing US defence sources, said that the raid
had been carried out by Israeli long-range fighter-bombers at the same time that
Israel was hammering the Gaza Strip in an attempt to stop Hamas militants firing
rockets into southern Israel.
Seventeen trucks full of weapons were destroyed and 39 people — Sudanese,
Eritrean and Ethiopian smugglers — were killed. The weapons were said to have
originated in Iran, which Israel accuses of being the main supplier of arms to
Hamas, and to the Lebanese militia Hezbollah. Israel refused to confirm or deny
the reports, mirroring its strict silence when its jets flew a high-risk raid in
2007 on a suspected nuclear plant that Syria was developing.
US sources said at the time that the Israelis had flown through Turkish air
space to avoid Syrian anti-aircraft batteries and blew up a nascent reactor
whose technology was supplied by North Korea and paid for by Iran.
“A convoy of vehicles carrying illegal weapons was bombed near the
Sudanese-Egyptian border in mid-January," said Mabruk Mubarak Saleem, Sudan’s
Transport Minister. He confirmed that people had been killed in the raid and
admitted that the weapons were bound for besieged Gaza. Hamas smuggles arms into
Gaza through a network of tunnels under the border with Egypt. Some of the
larger weapons, such as Iranian-made rockets capable of hitting many of Israel’s
southern cities, are floated in on buoys from the Sinai coast, Israeli officials
say.
Mr Saleem said that the smugglers were mainly impoverished tribesmen from his
own Rashidiya Arab tribe. Israeli intelligence officials have warned in the past
that Iran is sending Hamas anti-tank missiles, small arms, military grade high
explosives and missiles capable of penetrating up to 40 miles into Israel.
Other Sudanese politicians confirmed the strike, without identifying who
launched it. A senior politician from eastern Sudan said that colleagues had
spoken to a survivor. “There was an Ethiopian fellow, a mechanic. He was the
only one who survived. He said they came in two planes. They passed over them
then came back and they shot the cars. He couldn’t tell the nationality of the
aircraft . . . The aircraft destroyed the vehicles. There were four or five
vehicles," he said.
Sudanese media said that the attack took place northwest of Port Sudan city,
near Mount al-Shaanun.
Israel has a long history of covert strikes against its enemies’ arsenals,
the most famous being the 1981 raid against Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear
reactor, when 14 Israeli fighter-bombers and their escorts flew almost 700 miles
through Jordan and Saudi Arabia, managing to evade detection before blowing up
the new reactor.
That level of covert activity has been renewed in recent years, with the
attack on the suspected Syrian reactor and the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh,
Hezbollah’s military chief, in Damascus. being ascribed to Israel.
The latest raid was seen as a blow against Hamas’ rearmament efforts and as
warning to Iran, at an advanced stage in developing its nuclear capability. The
message was clear: Israel was prepared to strike long range into the heart of
enemy territory.
Israel Killed 39 in Attack on Sudan Convoy
January Strike Destroyed Several Trucks,
Injured Civilians
By Jason Ditz
Antiwar.com, March 25, 2009
Answering accusations from a Sudanese minister that the US Air Force had
killed 39 people in a January attack in that nation, US officials
say that in fact it was the Israeli military that launched the attack on
a convoy of trucks northwest of Port Sudan city.
Reportedly, the Israeli planes used a
US
base in Djibouti to stage the attacks, as part of the
agreement between Israel and the outgoing Bush Administration made in mid
January. Israeli officials
would neither confirm nor deny the attacks.
The trucks attacked were said to be smuggling small arms to Hamas, and
while an exact date for the attack was not given it appears to have been
shortly (perhaps just days) after the Israeli military
halted its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. Everyone in the trucks,
said to include Ethiopians and Eritreans, was reported killed, and an
unknown number of civilians were also said to be wounded in the attack.
