Iran Reportedly Shelled Israeli-Owned Ships Two Days After Hamas Deputy Leader Assassination

The news points to a more immediate response by Iran to the assassination and escalation of the war in the Middle East perhaps the furthest distance from Israel and Gaza to date.

On January 2, 2024, Israeli forces fired a targeted drone attack at a building with offices where Hamas and Hezbollah officials reportedly met regularly, in the Mushrifiyah district in Lebanon’s capital city of Beirut. The drones also struck a car parked below and adjacent to the building.

In the process, those drones killed Saleh al-Arouri, a senior deputy official of Hamas, and five additional people who have so far remained unnamed.

Al-Arouri reportedly is said to have been the primary link between Hamas and Hezbollah for all issues. In that role, he was a highly trusted associate of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s head of operations in Gaza, and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the Secretary-General of Hezbollah.

Al-Arouri was also a key player in negotiations between Israel and Hamas over the ongoing release of captives seized in Gaza both by Israel’s IDF forces and by Hamas in recent months.

Al-Arouri was permanently based in Lebanon and had been for years.

His targeted killing by Israeli forces, possibly including Mossad, enraged Lebanese officials, who called the attacks a “attack on Lebanese sovereignty”.

Hezbollah said at the time it "consider[s] the crime of killing Saleh al-Arouri and his companions in the heart of Beirut’s Dahiyeh a dangerous aggression against Lebanon and its people, security, sovereignty and resistance.”

Iran’s senior leadership threatened reprisals for the acts.

Until now, the only form of that which had been confirmed so far was Iran’s Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC)’s blowing up of a suspected Mossad regional outpost based in Erbil, Iraq, in Kurdistan, just before midnight on January 15, 2024.

Now it has been revealed that Iran was also behind aerial assaults carried out on two Israeli-owned cargo ships on January 4, 2024, just two days after al-Arouri’s murder. This had been kept quiet by most media. 

January 4 was also the day a funeral ceremony was being held for al-Arouri at the Palestinian Martyrs Cemetery in Beirut, Lebanon.

One of the ships was the Singaporean-flagged Pacific Gull supply ship. The second was the Chem Cilicon, which sailed under the Liberian flag.

The Pacific Gull was struck off the coast of the Maldives and the Chem Cilicon 200 miles off the coast of India. Both were far distant from the Red Sea which Yemeni forces had been working to disrupt in the Red Sea.

Their proximity to India could force its anti-Muslim fascist Prime Minister Narendra Modi to get involved more in the current conflict than he might have wished.

The fate of the two ships after the attacks has not been confirmed as of this writing.

The story about IRGC’s air strikes on the two Israeli vessels was first published by the trusted Lebanese Al-Mayadeen online news source, which has been doing an excellent job of trying to cover events, despite Israel killing their journalists.