Questions surround the Missile Carrying Iranian Ship intercepted by Israel

Questions continue to swirl around a shipment of Iranian missiles the Israeli navy intercepted near Sudan, with experts saying the weapons' true destination might reveal a hidden agenda in Tehran. 

A tricky trail of paperwork and the circuitous route of the Panama-flagged ship found to be carrying lethal M-302 missiles from Iran showed a major effort to hide the cargo and the parties involved. The Israeli Defense Forces say the weapons aboard the ship, now being towed to the southern Israeli port of Eilat on the Red Sea, were bound for the terrorist enclave of Gaza via the Sinai Peninsula.

“We are absolutely certain they [the missiles] were headed to Gaza,” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Peter Lerner told FoxNews.com. “The intelligence on this mission has been gathered over months. We know that it was supposed to probably go by land from Port Sudan via the Sinai Peninsula and into Gaza."

While Iran has recently rebuilt close ties to Hamas operatives in Gaza, enhanced cooperation between Egypt and Israel has made smuggling goods from Sinai into Gaza difficult at best. The daunting logistics of such a smuggling operation, and the risks of confiscation of such valuable weapons, has given rise to speculation that the missiles were not meant to go beyond the Sinai. The lawless peninsula between Egypt's mainland and Israel has in recent years become a hotbed of jihadist activity. 

“The obvious conclusion...is that a large part of the rockets on the arms ship – perhaps even all of them – were meant to reach Sinai and be activated from there,” suggested veteran award-winning Israeli war correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai in today’s ynetnews.com. “It's possible that the Gazans, (Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees), were supposed to leave [Gaza] for Sinai, and build a hidden launching system there in an isolated area which the Egyptian army finds it difficult to reach and control.”

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