Santorini arms ship completed three smuggling trips before being intercepted by Israel

This was not your typical holiday cruise ship. Ah, busy Lebanon, serving the needs of its master, Syria, and just recently many nations pledged to help this beleaguered nation because of its economic difficulties.

Prior to its capture by the Israel Navy, the Santorini -- one of two arms-smuggling vessels stopped by Israel since the start of the intifada -- made three successful trips from Lebanon to the Gaza and the Sinai coast, The Jerusalem Report has learned. Only on its fourth mission, in May 2001, was the Santorini, loaded with Katyusha rockets, anti-tank missiles, mortars, small arms and ammunition, picked up in the Mediterranean; the Karine A, with a similar but larger cargo, was intercepted by Israeli naval commandos in the Red Sea in January 2002.

The Santorini’s first voyage, directed by Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), was from Tripoli in November 2000. Its second and third voyages, both in April 2001, were run by Hizballah, and the fourth, failed attempt, again by the PFLP-GC. The arms cargoes in the "successful" trips were dropped along the Gaza coast and off Sinai, from where they could be smuggled into Palestinian territory through the maze of tunnels on the Egypt-Gaza frontier.

The case of the Santorini again underlines the close links between Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Palestinian terror operations, according to a senior military source, who adds that the ship, originally called the Abd Al-Hadi, was acquired for the PFLP-GC in the port of Arwad, a small island off the Syrian coast, and was registered as Syrian.

The arms smuggled during the first voyage were packed in Syria and transferred to Tripoli via the Damascus-Beirut highway in a Syrian bus, according to the documented interrogation of one of the captured Lebanese crew members. The man told Israeli interrogators that the third shipment of arms was loaded by 25 Hizballah men on the beach at Jiyah, south of Beirut.

Intelligence sources say that the arms smuggling is merely the tip of an iceberg of Syrian and Iranian support for terror activities. According to one document shown to The Report, Iranian and Syrian money is regularly funneled into the territories in order to "not allow a calming down of the situation," and directives for attacks are also transmitted directly from Damascus.