Netanyahu blames Iran for attack on Israeli-owned ship

Benjamin Netanyahu has blamed Iran for last week’s attack on an Israeli-owned cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman and vowed to retaliate against his country’s “greatest enemy”.

The Israeli prime minister’s latest accusation against Tehran — made in an interview with public broadcaster Kan Radio on Sunday night — will complicate US president Joe Biden’s attempts to improve relations with Iran and bring it back to nuclear talks.

The blast struck the Israeli-owned MV Helios Ray, a cargo ship carrying automobiles, as it left the Middle East en route to Singapore.

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman said on Monday his country “categorically” denied the allegations, adding that the Gulf and the Sea of Oman “are our inseparable security fields and we will not let such remarks create [Irano-] phobia in the region”.

Saeed Khatibzadeh went on to refer to Israel as Jerusalem’s occupying regime, and vowed to respond to Israeli aggression “appropriately”.

Iran’s official denial came despite an analysis in the Kayhan newspaper — the mouthpiece of Iran’s hardliners — which described the attack on the ship as a warning to Israel that its recent diplomatic thaw with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain was unlikely to lead to further entrenchment in Iran’s southern waters.

It added that after “the vessel, which is most probably a warship, was targeted very professionally” and “regardless of who did it” the Jewish state would “get out of its illusions” that its attacks could not be responded to.

The Netanyahu interview was aired on the same day the Syrian government blamed Israel for overnight air strikes on Iranian targets within its borders.

Israel has not claimed responsibility for the latest attack, although its military has struck hundreds of Iranian targets in Syria over the past year.

The US last week launched strikes in Syria after blaming Iran-backed Shia militias for an attack on a base hosting US troops near Erbil, northern Iraq, which killed a civilian contractor and injured a US soldier.

The Pentagon said there was no evidence that Iran was behind the Erbil attack, but the incident prompted Biden to authorise air strikes against Iranian-backed Iraqi militias in Syria, his first military act as president.

Iran at the weekend rejected the prospect of direct negotiations with Washington until Biden rolled back his predecessor’s maximum pressure campaign of punitive sanctions, a policy championed by Netanyahu.

“Iran will not have nuclear weapons, with or without an agreement, and I said that to President Biden,” Netanyahu told Kan Radio.

Tehran has in recent weeks threatened to suspend short-notice inspections by the UN watchdog monitoring the Islamic republic’s atomic activity.

Yoav Galant, a former navy commando now serving as Israel’s minister of education, told Ynet News that pictures of the damage to the cargo ship indicated that several mines had been attached to its exterior, echoing a military official’s text message to the Financial Times that it “looked like a simple limpet” mine.

Israel’s security cabinet will consider a proposal to provide naval escorts to Israeli-owned ships in the Gulf; commercial traffic tied to Israel has increased measurably since the signing of the diplomatic accords in 2020.

Iran has seized and allegedly attacked at least half a dozen international oil tankers in the southern Gulf waters since May 2019, after Donald Trump imposed sanctions. It has also shot down a US drone on charges of crossing into Iran’s airspace.

Iran has also vowed to avenge the November murder of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a senior nuclear scientist, that it blamed on Israeli agents.

Fakhrizadeh, who had been singled out by Netanyahu as a mastermind of Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, was killed in a complex operation on a highway outside Tehran. Israel never claimed responsibility for the assassination, but neither did it deny having a hand in it.