IDF naval commandos captured a ship bearing 50 tons of weapons apparently bound for the Palestinian Authority in a pre-dawn raid Thursday morning. Included among the weapons on the "Karine A" freighter were long-range rockets and missiles that could have reached major Israeli cities from Palestinian territory, dramatically altering Israel's security and the level of terror activity.

Codenamed "Noah's Ark," the IDF's operation was carried out some 300 miles south of Israel, near the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Commandos boarded the 4,000-ton, Palestinian-owned freighter on ropes suspended by helicopters and from rubber rafts. The entire mission to subdue the ship's 13-man crew reportedly took eight minutes with no gunfire exchanged.

Most of the details of the operation were not released to

"This mission was planned in a very short amount of time" - Air Force Commander Maj.-Gen. Dan Halutz

the public. Maariv reported that the commandos descended from Black Hawk helicopters, which had to be refueled mid-route by IAF fueling planes due to the mission's extreme distance from Israel. Additional commandos boarded the freighter from rubber rafts launched from Israeli Navy Super Devora patrol boats. Apache helicopters reportedly provided cover for the operation, which was carried out in international waters.

"This mission was planned in a very short amount of time and very efficiently," Air Force Commander Maj.-Gen. Dan Halutz told a press conference in Tel Aviv on Friday. "The actual execution of the mission was a little bit better than the rehearsal."

"The mission was carried out under the direct supervision of Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz, who coordinated the IDF's actions himself from a Boeing 700 command craft cruising high above the Red Sea, with F-15A fighters for additional cover. Mofaz had been scheduled to travel to Washington on Thursday, the day of the operation, but called off his visit the day before, citing the pending peace mission of U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni.

"50 times the amount captured on Santorini"
Karine A's shipment contained both 122 mm and 107 mm Katyusha rockets, which have ranges of 20 and 8 kilometers, respectively. It also contained 80 mm and 120 mm mortar shells, Sagger and LAW anti-tank missiles, anti-tank mines, advanced explosive equipment, sniper rifles, Kalashnikov rifles and ammunition.

If launched from the Gaza Strip, the 122 mm Katyushas could have threatened Ashkelon and other coastal cities. From the West Bank, Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and most other major Israeli cities would have been within range. Also included in the ship's cargo were rubber boats and diving equipment, which might have enabled seaborne attacks on Israel's coastal cities from Gaza.

Mofaz estimated that the arms cache was close to 50 times the amount borne by the Santorini, a boat seized by Israel last May en route from Lebanon to the Palestinian Authority in Gaza.

"Try to imagine if, God forbid, they had a 122mm Katyusha inside the Palestinian Authority, with a range of 20 kilometers, where they could reach and what kind of damage they could cause to Israeli civilians and soldiers," Mofaz said. "If these weapons had reached terrorists acting against us, it would have dramatically…widened the scope of terror against us for a long time."

Following the ship's seizure, it sailed with an Israeli crew escorted by navy patrol boats to the naval base in Eilat, where the weapons cache was carefully removed from the ship.

This incident marks the most extensive attempt to smuggle weapons into the PA to date, though IDF sources say there is no way to know how many ships and other shipments succeeded before this failed operation.

A circuitous route to final destination
According to army sources, Karine A was purchased by the Palestinian Authority in Lebanon and sailed to Sudan, where it was loaded with dummy cargo to avoid suspicion. The crew changed and the ship then sailed to Yemen two months ago. In December, it received orders to sail to the Iranian-owned island of Kish in the Persian Gulf, where another vessel, believed to have been Iranian, transferred 83 watertight crates to it.

After stopping for repairs in Yemen, the ship set sail for the Suez Canal. The plan was to unload the crates onto three smaller ships that would subsequently deposit them at sea off the Gaza Strip, where the Palestinian Naval Police was to retrieve it. The arms were stored in waterproof containers enabling them to float off the Gaza coast until they could be collected.

Israeli naval intelligence had been monitoring the ship ever since it was purchased by the Palestinian Authority several months ago. It noticed that the ship's travel log was not consistent with a cargo ship and gathered additional intelligence, concluding that it was an arms vessel. The United States was also involved in the tracking operation, senior administration officials confirmed over the weekend, but the U.S. did not participate in the operation.

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