What does the continuing, low-intensity conflict between Israel and Iran have to do with the mysterious oil spill that has washed ashore along the coast of Israel and southern Lebanon in recent weeks, leaving a costly ecological disaster?
Nothing at all was the first assumption. But as more information comes to light, the two may be intimately linked.
The first sign that Iran and Israel were involved in an asymmetric naval conflict came with reports of an attack against an Israeli-owned merchant vessel in the Gulf of Oman in late February. That’s obviously a long way from the Mediterranean.
But then two weeks later, an Iranian state-run shipping company reported an attack on one of its vessels in the eastern Mediterranean off the Syrian coast. Speculation soon followed that this could have been Israel’s response to the earlier attack on its commercial vessel – only for it then to emerge in a Wall Street Journal report last week that the attack was apparently part of an Israeli campaign against Iranian cargo vessels and oil tankers over the last 18 months that has reportedly targeted a dozen vessels.
So could the oil spill have actually been an unexpected consequence of Israel’s own clandestine campaign against Iran, as some media outlets have already speculated? In the wake of the Wall Street Journal report, Israel’s defence minister on Sunday denied that Israel bore any responsibility for the damage along the coast.
Read the article by Roger Shanahan in The Interpreter.