THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF THE IRANIAN WEAPONS REACHING GAZA BY SEA:A Collaboration between Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and Yasser Arafat

Commemoration and the Quds Force Mandate

In his speech on 5 August 2025, Hezbollah Secretary-General Sheikh Naim Qassem — reminiscing about martyr Brigadier-General Haj Mohammad Saeed Izadi, alias Haj Ramadan, the head of the Palestine Branch of the IRGC-Quds Force, who was martyred during the June 2025 war with the Zionist entity — said that Haj Ramadan was given the portfolio of the Palestine Branch by Qasem Soleimani after the liberation of South Lebanon and the start of the al-Aqsa (Second) Intifada, in 2000. This portfolio made Haj Ramadan responsible for helping the Palestinian resistance organizations with training and with logistical, military and economic means, transforming a movement that resisted with stones into one with a self-reliant arsenal of missiles, rockets, anti-tank weapons, thermobaric RPGs and improvised explosives. That arsenal enabled not only launching al-Aqsa Flood in October 2023 — the greatest raid in the history of guerrilla warfare that humiliated the Zionist army and destroyed all feelings of security among settlers — but also resisting the Zionist onslaught in the subsequent war for two years, where the Zionist enemy dropped bombs worth the equivalent of seven Hiroshimas on Gaza, still not being able to defeat the resistance or retrieve its captive soldiers.

Hamas’s representative in Tehran, Khaled Qaddoumi, said after the martyrdom of Haj Ramadan that Haj Qasem Soleimani used to say: “as long as Haj Ramadan is there, I do not worry about Palestine.” This remark illustrates the Quds Force’s division of labor under Soleimani: several brigadier-generals were tasked with helping particular resistance movements in the region, embedding themselves among local fighters and becoming an integral part of those movements. In that spirit Haj Ramadan was described as “more Palestinian than the Palestinians” (in the words attributed to Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ziad al-Nakhaleh). In the same fashion, Martyr Major-General Mohammad Reza Zahedi — who, according to Martyr Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah— was “more Lebanese than the Lebanese.” Similarly Martyr Hamid Taghavi was “more Iraqi than the Iraqis” and Martyr Sayyid Razi Mousavi “more Syrian than the Syrians.”

The role Ayatollah Khamenei assigned to the Quds Force at its creation in 1990 was that of an elite vanguard of the international Islamic revolution: a special-forces command responsible for training mujahideen from around the world and occasionally fighting alongside them for liberation — from the battlefields of Bosnia, Sudan and Somalia in the 1990s to those of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon in the twenty-first century.

Haj Qasem Soleimani became leader of the Quds Force in 1997. Haj Ramadan became his deputy for Palestinian affairs in 2000. So, what was their first operation in the service of helping the Palestinians resist occupation? This article is concerned with giving the details of that operation.

The Political Context: September 2000 and the Second Intifada

It was September 2000. While negotiations at Camp David were continuing between Israelis and Palestinians to achieve peace and create a Palestinian state, the Palestinians had many reasons to be resentful. The Oslo Accords, signed with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1994, had not only failed to liberate the Palestinian territories from Israeli occupation but had cost Rabin his life; he was assassinated in 1995 by a far-right Jewish settler. The belligerent right-wing Netanyahu government that had won the Israeli elections in 1996 increased illegal settlements in the West Bank to the detriment of the Palestinians. In May 2000 Hezbollah — which had been engaged in continuous armed resistance since 1982 against the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon — had forced Israel to abandon Lebanon, demonstrating to many Palestinians that armed struggle could be more effective than negotiations.

The Israeli election campaign was characterized by the inflammatory rhetoric of right-wing opposition leader Ariel Sharon, who provoked tensions with the centrist government of Ehud Barak. Sharon’s provocative entrance into the al-Aqsa compound in occupied East Jerusalem — the third holiest site for Muslims after Mecca and Medina — and, a few days later, the killing of a young Palestinian child by Israeli bullets in Ramallah in the West Bank, formed the final straw: the Second Intifada had just broken out.

Arafat’s Calculus: Rockets as Leverage

Yasser Arafat, the longtime leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization and, since 1994, head of the Palestinian Authority, felt anxious but also liberated. Through the Oslo process, Arafat had gained political (though not full military) control of parts of the West Bank and Gaza — and with that control some weapons — and he could seek more in the future. Yet at nearly every major peace-deal signing ceremony he felt uneasy, thinking back to his days as a rebel who always kept a gun close at hand. Conventional weapons and police arms were not enough against Israel’s military superiority. He therefore considered a new idea: what if Palestinian forces could acquire rockets?

If Arafat could start firing Iranian-made Katyusha rockets at a major Israeli city near the Gaza Strip — for example Ashkelon — then he could potentially extract a new set of concessions from Israel regarding future borders. He could return to negotiations with a different balance of leverage, and, if needed, escalate further, perhaps with larger rockets. To make all this happen, in early 2001 Arafat convened a meeting of key senior PLO officials who managed its arsenal.

The PLO Arms Network Mobilizes

Those present included his right-hand man and broker, Fuad Shubaki; Fathi Ghazem, who had served as Arafat’s personal bodyguard; Adel Mughrabi, the operational head of the arms-supply network; and PLO naval officer Ahmad Haris. The latter two would serve as liaisons to Hezbollah and Iran. Mughrabi was very close to Arafat and had extensive experience in resistance operations. He recruited the PLO’s top ship captain, Omar Akawi, to command a ship for the operation, while Ghazem would handle some of the complex naval and diving aspects.

As Arafat saw it, this operation represented a significant opportunity to obtain powerful weapons and financial and logistical support from two of Israel’s persistent adversaries — Iran and Hezbollah. Under the plan, Iran and Hezbollah would finance and supply the weapons and transport them aboard a Palestinian Authority ship. To this day, Zionist intelligence is unsure whether the plan originally came from Hezbollah’s military leader, Imad Mughniyeh, or from a top IRGC commander, Major-General Qassem Soleimani, although it appears the head of Hezbollah’s military wing was the original mastermind.

Before the operation began, Hezbollah and the Iranian Guards devised a clever plan to distract the Israeli navy: they would commission special floating tubes designed to carry weapons. PLO personnel would be trained in Iran in scuba diving and in the handling of these tubes. The Palestinian Authority’s role would be to buy a ship and hire a crew to pick up the weapons coming from Iran. In return, Arafat would agree to allow some pro-Iranian Palestinian resistance organizations (Hamas and Islamic Jihad) to operate in PA areas — an arrangement that, from Arafat’s perspective, he could later curtail if he chose. It was, to his mind, a strategic bargain.

The Axis Forms: Meetings and Preparation

How did the PA, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards begin to cooperate in the supply of weapons? This new axis did not develop overnight. The connection began in April 2000 with a series of meetings in Russia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) between Palestinian and Iranian officials, all of which took place with Arafat’s specific approval. The Iranians then prepared the floating containers for the weapons. Salem al-Sankari was recruited for the operation because of his diving skills and traveled to Lebanon, where he was trained in the handling of the special Iranian floating containers.

For the small price of allowing Iran certain activities in PA territories, Arafat would receive game-changing weapons. In any case, he had little choice. Just a few months earlier, in Tampa, Egypt, in December 2000, Arafat had rejected Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s peace plan, which he could not accept because it left East Jerusalem divided and allowed Jewish settlements to cut through Arab neighborhoods. Arafat famously said the Palestinian leader who would sell even an inch of Jerusalem’s territory had not yet been born. Now he faced Ariel Sharon, his enemy since the First Lebanon War in 1982.

Arafat and Sharon: A Long Rivalry

Sharon — the butcher of Sabra and Shatila, and labeled a “pyromaniac terrorist” by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman — knew Arafat well. In Lebanon, Arafat at times displayed gestures such as sending flowers to families of defeated opponents, an expression of a kind of delicacy to some observers. Sharon, by contrast, was infamous for ruthlessness. For Arafat, there was little prospect that Israel’s far-right Prime Minister would grant Palestinian statehood through negotiation, so he concluded the only viable option might be armed confrontation. He believed the only way to embarrass Sharon was to surprise him with high-quality weapons for which Israel was not prepared — specifically, rockets from Iran.

Arafat’s top officers each presented different aspects of the arms-procurement plan. There were risks, but Iran would provide most of the money and the weapons. When a ship carrying the weapons arrived near Israel, the plan called for unloading the weapons and retrieving them covertly. Arafat ordered Subaki to raise and disperse the necessary funds to purchase ships and hire crews. He ordered Mughrabi to recruit key crew members, including Akawi. He also ordered Mughrabi and Haris to coordinate with Hezbollah and the Guards to advance the operation.

The Rise of Imad Mughniyeh

Exile in Tunis had kept Arafat away from the Levant for years; he remembered those years bitterly and desired revenge. Yet he remained the undisputed, elected Palestinian leader and returned to the political scene years before Sharon. A significant twist from Arafat’s expulsion from Lebanon was that it left a talented twenty-year-old Lebanese Shiʿite fighter — a member of Fatah — unemployed and seeking direction. This young Shiʿite was no ordinary recruit: Fatah was a Sunni-dominated organization, yet this man rose quickly through the ranks of Fatah’s elite Force 17. He became Arafat’s bodyguard and the protector of other top Fatah officials, charged with thwarting assassination attempts — in effect an expert at evading Mossad operations. That young Lebanese Shiʿite mujahid was Imad Mughniyeh, who would become a leading opponent of the CIA and Mossad for some twenty-five years.

Born in 1962, Mughniyeh became close to Arafat during the PLO’s period in Lebanon and when he was old enough to join a military unit (at sixteen — which in West Asia is practically, if not officially, the age of conscription). Those ties from Lebanon would prove crucial eighteen years later when Mughniyeh helped devise a plan to supply weapons to the PLO and Arafat. Even after Arafat left Lebanon, Mughniyeh did not remain idle. By 1982 Mughniyeh had become a legend: he defended the Ain al-Hilweh camp, delaying the Israeli advance on Beirut for ten days in June. He was also credited as the mastermind behind the kidnapping of David Dodge, dean of the American University of Beirut, whom Mughniyeh’s Islamic Jihad Organization abducted in July 1982 in hopes of exchanging him for four Iranian diplomats held by the Maronite Phalangists.

Mughniyeh became the figure who linked the PLO–Hezbollah–Iran triangle. From his elite positions as the Palestinian leader’s bodyguard, he learned painstaking attention to detail and methods to avoid detection and assassination. These skills frustrated numerous Mossad and CIA assassination attempts as he rose to become Hezbollah’s military commander and the architect of audacious resistance attacks worldwide. Mughniyeh and Iran’s Qassem Soleimani later formed an operational duo that, in the narrative, was unstoppable. Yet while Mughniyeh pursued clandestine operations, Arafat for a time pursued a different path — engaging in historic peace negotiations with Israel.

Oslo, Geography and Operational Capacity

When Arafat achieved global prominence as a warrior-turned-politician with the Oslo Accords in 1993 his stature grew. Sharon, meanwhile, did not return to political prominence until the late 1990s. The peace process produced new realities on the ground: it established Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Consequently, Arafat’s practical ability to support the Second Intifada was more immediate than during the First Intifada, when he and the PLO leadership were in Tunisia and thus geographically distant. The PA now had weapons for its security forces and geographic proximity to offer operational support for Palestinians resisting occupation. This context — and the long historical rivalry with Sharon — framed Arafat’s decision to seek rockets from Iran. Knowing his military weakness relative to Israel and anticipating confrontation with Sharon, Arafat struck deals with Mughniyeh, Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards to increase the Palestinian arsenal. He hoped his new allies — connected through his former bodyguard Mughniyeh — could balance the forces or give him an advantage over Ariel Sharon.

Concealment and Innovation: The Floating Tubes

In the summer of 2001 Israeli intelligence reported that either Mughniyeh or his deputy Haj Bassem met with Guard and PLO representatives in the UAE and other locations to plan the secret arms-supply operation. Previous meetings reportedly took place in Moscow and Oman in April 2000, though Zionist intelligence cannot be certain of timing or messengers. Since Mughniyeh typically delivered important messages in person, either he or Bassem likely returned to Iran in 2000–2001 for further discussions on supplying arms to the Palestinian Authority. Khamenei would await briefings in his offices; as head of state he was not expected to meet Mughniyeh directly, yet Mughniyeh anticipated contact with Quds Force head Qassem Soleimani and IRGC commander Rahim Safavi.

As the Second Intifada began in 2000, Mughniyeh and Soleimani convinced Khamenei to build a new alliance with Arafat to escalate attacks on Israel. After Safavi and Soleimani met with Mughniyeh and his representatives, Khamenei recognized the operation would require significant time, money and resources. Generals who had become establishment figures after the Iran–Iraq War were risk-averse; by contrast, Mughniyeh, Soleimani, Izadi and Safavi were willing to take personal risks, a posture that helped persuade Khamenei.

Yet the risk was real. The Israeli Navy had improved its capabilities; the capture of the Santorini in May 2001 showed Israel was vigilant against maritime smuggling. Mughniyeh, however, was among the few commanders who had repeatedly outwitted Israeli and American services. His bold idea — to drop weapons sealed in special floating tubes off the coast of Egypt so that the Israeli Navy would miss the smuggling ships — was ingenious. Mughniyeh and Soleimani also presented elaborate plans to conceal a ship’s name, flag, destination and voyage history. The plan was risky but offered a plausible chance of success by leveraging surprise. Zionist intelligence believed Khamenei appreciated that no Iranians would be aboard receiving vessels; absent identifiable Iranians on board, a future Israeli interception would not provide incontrovertible proof linking Iran to the shipments. Khamenei gave Safavi and Soleimani the green light, which they passed to Izadi and Mughniyeh.

Izadi, Mughniyeh and “project manager” Bassem had a secret meeting with Adel Mughrabi, the head of the PLO smuggling network, and Soleimani in the United Arab Emirates. In June 2001, on Arafat’s orders through Mughrabi, Omar Akkawi purchased a fishing boat in Egypt. Along with another boat acquired some months earlier, Akkawi, Mughrabi and the planners resolved to use these vessels to pick up Iranian weapons and transport them to Gaza. In July 2001 Hezbollah and Iranian operatives jointly constructed sealed floating containers that could be dropped and stored just below the water’s surface until fishing boats could retrieve them. At the same time, they sought and trained divers for recovery missions. Zionist intelligence had vague indications Iranians were experimenting with underwater equipment, but the Israelis could not conclusively link those trials to a Palestinian recipient — the material might have been destined for Hezbollah.

The RIM K and a Dispersal Strategy

In August 2001 the PLO arms-supply network sought a larger cargo vessel. It reportedly purchased the RIM K on 31 August from a Lebanese company, the transaction executed by an Iraqi middleman acting on Mughrabi’s behalf. Mughniyeh knew Zionist intelligence had infiltrated PLO circles; his strategic response was redundancy — ship a steady stream of weapons on many vessels rather than concentrate everything on one. He assigned his top aide, Bassem, to personally handle delivery to PLO captain Akawi. Zionist intelligence, particularly naval intelligence, remained uneasy and in the dark. Agencies sensed a major covert procurement operation involving the IRGC and Hezbollah but could not build a stable, reliable informant network in those circles and feared that failure to penetrate the operation would lead to disaster.

Capture and Claims: The Karine A and the Ten Ships

Ultimately, of the ten ships alleged to have carried Iranian weapons destined for the Palestinian resistance, Israeli forces located and captured the largest — the Karine A — in January 2002 and hailed its seizure as a major victory. Supporters of the operation counter that the remaining nine smaller vessels reached Gaza and reinforced the arsenals of both the PLO and Hamas. They argue the operation had two axes: one from Iran via Egypt coordinated by Mughniyeh and Soleimani (to which the Karine A belonged), and a second via Lebanon coordinated by Jihad Jibril — son of PFLP-GC Secretary-General Ahmad Jibril — of which Israeli services were purportedly unaware.

Twenty years later, Talal al-Naji, the PFLP-GC’s new Secretary-General, recounted details: “The Islamic Republic [of Iran] has made a great contribution and invested a lot of effort in developing the military capabilities of the Palestinian resistance through training, developing weapons, and teaching our comrades among the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank how to manufacture weapons and rockets. As you know, there are difficulties in transporting these weapons and rockets to occupied Palestine. This is a new equation. In the past, weapons were transported [to Palestine], while today they are manufactured [there]. But even in the transportation of weapons, Iran made an effort to support us in transporting weapons by sea, as you know. Let me tell you about what I heard from General Qassem Soleimani, may he rest in peace. He told me: ‘We sent ten ships full of weapons.’ Most people probably don’t know about these ships, except for one, called Karine A, which was captured by the Zionist enemy in the Red Sea. This one was going to the martyr Yasser Arafat, to the brothers of the Fatah movement — not to Hamas, not to [Islamic] Jihad, not to the Popular Front. No. It was sent to Fatah. Ten ships were sent to the various Palestinian resistance organizations in Palestine. That was in the beginning, when we were transporting weapons.”

Talal al-Naji further recounted operational details: the martyr Jihad Jibril — the son of Abu Jihad, Ahmad Jibril — who was assassinated by Zionist gangs in Beirut when his car was blown up on May 20, 2002, was responsible for transporting weapons from Lebanon to Gaza. They killed him because he was responsible for transporting weapons from Lebanon to Gaza. He sent three ships from Lebanon to the sea. The martyr Jihad Jibril asked them to send divers and small boats to retrieve the barrels from the sea and bring them to the shore, and we used to divide the weapons, even giving [Hamas] most of the weapons, because of their [relative] size and responsibility. He would give them most of the weapons and we would take some of them. That was at the beginning. Later, under Soleimani’s supervision, it was decided that fighters in Gaza should be able to manufacture weapons and even develop missiles. At first these weapons were small — missiles with ranges of about two kilometers and limited effect. General Qassem Soleimani supervised development in cooperation with brothers in Syria. Training sometimes took place in Iran, sometimes in Syria, and sometimes in Lebanon with Hezbollah.

Soleimani also planned the delivery of the Kornet — the Russian anti-tank guided missile — to Gaza. Kornets were reportedly used to destroy tanks such as the Merkava. Many Merkava tanks were destroyed in 2009 in the first major Hamas-Israeli war in Gaza, an outcome that is due to the Soleimani’s works.

Anis al-Naqqash’s Recollection and Logistics via Sinai

In late 2020 Lebanese revolutionary Anis al-Naqqash — who began as a Marxist-Leninist militant in the 1970s, converted to Shia Islam after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and became close to both Mughniyeh and Soleimani — also recalled these operations. He said: “One of the most beautiful arms transfer operations, I can reveal today, except for the case of the ship ‘Karine A’, which was intended for Yasser Arafat, and not for Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Yasser Arafat requested a significant supply of weapons, because every time he traveled from the occupied territories and back, he brought back a few weapons in his car or with his guards, but it was not enough for real protection. Then, they sent a ship to Iran, to be loaded [with weapons]. This ship was the ‘Karine A’, which was later captured. On the night it was loaded, the martyr Qassem Soleimani and Imad Mughniyeh were standing in the port and supervising the loading. After this case was revealed, the entire arms transfer process was improved in various ways, and the enemy could no longer detect them.”

Al-Naqqash described later logistics: weapons were accumulated in El-Arish and the Sinai region. Transporting these weapons to Gaza through tunnels would take a long time, and fighters inside Gaza feared an imminent Israeli attack. He recalled how during moments of severe humanitarian need — the example given is Gazans breaking through the Egyptian border fence in January 2008 to get food, blankets and equipment — buses and trucks entered Gaza from Sinai in plain sight. Those convoys, he claimed, sometimes carried not only humanitarian goods but rockets and weapons.

• This article is written by Abu Dhar al-Bosni (lokiloptr154668 on X) and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the website), nor does it necessarily represent an agreement with these perspectives.