U.S. Seeks Ship to Move Unusually Large Amount of Weapons to Israel

January 10th, 2009

Colin Powell, October 2008: “There’s going to be a crisis come along on the 21st or 22nd of January that we don’t even know about right now.”

And now, a freakishly large U.S. arms shipment is due to arrive in Israel in two lots, the first on 25 January and the second by the end of January.

Via: Reuters:

The U.S. is seeking to hire a merchant ship to deliver hundreds of tonnes of arms to Israel from Greece later this month, tender documents seen by Reuters show.

The U.S. Navy’s Military Sealift Command (MSC) said the ship was to carry 325 standard 20-foot containers of what is listed as “ammunition” on two separate journeys from the Greek port of Astakos to the Israeli port of Ashdod in mid-to-late January.

A “hazardous material” designation on the manifest mentions explosive substances and detonators, but no other details were given.

“Shipping 3,000-odd tonnes of ammunition in one go is a lot,” one broker said, on condition of anonymity.

“This (kind of request) is pretty rare and we haven’t seen much of it quoted in the market over the years,” he added.

The U.S. Defense Department, contacted by Reuters on Friday in Washington, had no immediate comment.

The MSC transports armour and military supplies for the U.S. armed forces aboard its own fleet, but regularly hires merchant ships if logistics so require.

The request for the ship was made on Dec. 31, with the first leg of the charter to arrive no later than January 25 and the second at the end of the month.

The tender for the vessel follows the hiring of a commercial ship to carry a much larger consignment of ordnance in December from the United States to Israel ahead of air strikes in the Gaza Strip.

A German shipping firm which won that tender confirmed the order when contacted by Reuters but declined to comment further.

CHARTERS “RARE”

Shipping brokers in London who have specialised in moving arms for the British and U.S. military in the past said such ship charters to Israel were rare.

Israel is one of America’s closest allies and both nations regularly sell arms to each other.

A senior military analyst in London who declined to be named said that, because of the timing, the shipments could be “irregular” and linked to the Gaza offensive.

The ship hired by the MSC in December was for a much larger cargo of arms, tender documents showed.

That stipulated a ship to be chartered for 42 days capable of carrying 989 standard 20-foot containers from Sunny Point, North Carolina to Ashdod.

The tender document said the vessel had to be capable of “carrying 5.8 million pounds (2.6 million kg) of net explosive weight”, which specialist brokers said was a very large quantity.

The ship was requested early last month to load on December 15.

In September, the U.S. Congress aproved the sale of 1,000 bunker-buster missiles to Israel. The GPS-guided GBU-39 is said to be one of the most accurate bombs in the world.

The Jerusalem Post, citing defence officials, reported last week that a first shipment of the missiles had arrived in early December and they were used in pentetrating Hamas’s underground rocket launcher sites.

Posted in War | Top Of Page

5 Responses to “U.S. Seeks Ship to Move Unusually Large Amount of Weapons to Israel”

  1. anothernut says:

    Mr. President-Elect! Mr. President-Elect! Would you please comment on this HUGE shipment of weapons? What? NO COMMENT?!!

    Of, by, and for the People. HA!

  2. lagavulin says:

    US Gov’t officials are responding now:

    http://uk.reuters.com/article/usPoliticsNews/idUKTRE50874B20090110

    Basically they’re saying “hey, those bullets aren’t meant for the Israeli army in Gaza…they’re for our US army in Israel!”

    Of course the Reuters team didn’t bother to address with the obvious question, about why exactly US forces in Israel are suddenly loading-up on munitions…

  3. travis says:

    I can’t even imagine what the insurance costs will be on this now publicly-known shipment to Israel.

    They haven’t run out of virgins in the Islamic heaven yet, right?

  4. tranquil says:

    Hmm, stockpiling weapons in countries where there are no US military bases. It sure makes this seem more true.

  5. Loveandlight says:

    To add further fuel to the fire of speculation going on here regarding this arms-shipment and the oil-market and -supply manipulations, here is an apparent attempt in the mainstream news media to catapult some anti-Iran propaganda.

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