UNITED NATIONS (AP) – Iran rejected what it claims to be unfounded claims by Israel that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard attacked an Israeli-owned cargo ship near the Gulf of Oman last month.
Iran’s ambassador to the UN, in a letter that circulated on Tuesday, accused Israel of “playing the victim to divert attention from all its destabilizing acts and evil practices across the region”.
Ambassador Majid Takht Ravanchi said in the letter to the UN Security Council that the incident “has all the characteristics of a complicated false flag operation by actors in order to pursue their evil policies and promote their illegitimate goals”.
He was responding to a letter to the council of the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan. He accused the Iranian Revolutionary Guard of attaching an explosive device to the Israeli-owned freighter Helios Ray in international waters near the Gulf of Oman on February 25. The ship was on its way from Saudi Arabia to Singapore.
The explosion caused “serious damage, forcing the ship to return to the port of Dubai to ensure the safety of the crew,” said Gilad in the letter, also released Tuesday.
Israel accused arch-rival Iran of developing nuclear weapons, a charge denied by Tehran, and of supporting hostile militant groups in the region, such as Hamas in Gaza and Lebanese Hezbollah. Israel acknowledged having carried out hundreds of air strikes against targets connected to Iran and its representatives in Syria.
Gilad’s letter cited previous Iranian attacks on civilian ships, including the seizure of a South Korean flag tanker in Gulf waters in early January and four commercial vessels in May 2019 in the UAE’s territorial waters, east of the port of Fujairah.
In the tense summer of 2019, the U.S. military blamed Iran for the explosions on two oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most strategic sea routes in the world. The United States has also attributed a series of other suspicious attacks to Iran, including the use of limpet mines – designed to be magnetically coupled to a ship’s hull – to paralyze the four tankers in the neighboring port of Fujairah in the Emirates.
The Israeli ambassador said that the February 25 attack and previous attacks “again prove that Iran will use all means to destabilize the region” and urged the Security Council to condemn Iran’s violations of the UN Charter “and hold the Iranian regime responsible for this… attack and to destabilize the regime. ”
Iran’s Ravanchi replied that the “Israeli regime” must be held responsible for all its “crimes, brutalities and threats … in particular its occupation of Palestine and parts of other countries, as well as its persistent military adventurism in a region as volatile as the Middle East. ”
He said Israel should “also be reminded that it will bear all the consequences of any possible miscalculation”.
The February 25 explosion came at a time when Iran increasingly violated the 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers, in an attempt to pressure US President Joe Biden to grant relief from the sanctions he received in the agreement that the former President Donald Trump abandoned it almost three years ago.
Iran has also blamed Israel for a recent series of attacks, including a mysterious explosion last summer that destroyed an advanced centrifuge assembly plant at its Natanz nuclear facility and the death of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leading Iranian scientist who founded the nuclear program. of the Islamic Republic. decades ago.