Israel assassinated a senior Hamas weapons smuggler late Tuesday night when it
bombed a rental car in Sudan, the Al-Arabiya news channel reported on Wednesday,
shedding light on the mysterious late-night air strike.
The station did
not identify the two men who were killed in the strike but said that one of them
was Sudanese and that the other was from another Arab country. Some reports have
claimed that he was a senior Hamas operative responsible for smuggling weapons
from Iran, Syria and Lebanon to the Gaza Strip.
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killed in Israeli air strike on Hamas compound in Gaza
Sudan is a known stop on
the smuggling route from Iran to Gaza. In 2009, on the sidelines of Operation
Cast Lead in the Strip, Israel Air Force aircraft reportedly bombed a convoy of
trucks carrying weaponry and traveling through the Sudanese desert on its way to
the Gaza Strip.
Ships reportedly sail from the Iranian port of Bandar
Abbas, controlled by the Revolutionary Guards Corps, and dock at an
Iranian-controlled port in Sudan. There, the weaponry is unloaded onto the back
of trucks that travel North into Egypt and through the Sinai Peninsula,
eventually unloading their cargo along the border with the Gaza
Strip.
According to the Sudanese, an aircraft approached Sudan from the
Red Sea and bombed the rental car about 14 kilometers south of Port Sudan. The
two men had reportedly just landed in Sudan an hour earlier.
Sudan’s
Foreign Minister Ali Karti on Wednesday accused Israel of carrying out an attack
on Tuesday near Port Sudan that killed two people and said Khartoum reserved the
right to react to the aggression.
“This is absolutely an Israeli attack,”
he told reporters.
He said Israel undertook the attack to scupper Sudan’s
chances of being removed from a US list of state sponsors of
terrorism.
The government in Jerusalem declined to
comment.
Sudanese officials have offered different versions on how the
strike was carried out. Police say a missile hit the car near the port city, but
a state government official blamed the bombing on a foreign aircraft that flew
in from the Red Sea.
Washington this year initiated the process to remove
Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism after a peaceful January
referendum in which the country’s south voted to secede.
Israel has been
operating persistently against the Iranian smuggling mechanism since Operation
Cast Lead.
In November 2009, the navy seized the Francop cargo ship that
was taking weaponry to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and last month seized the Victoria,
which was shipping weaponry to Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Reuters
contributed to this report.