Iran operates an illegal smuggling route across the Middle East, using intelligence agents, militants and criminal gangs, to deliver weapons to Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to officials from the United States, Israel and Iran.
The goal, as described by three Iranian officials, is to incite unrest against Israel by flooding the enclave with as many weapons as possible.
The covert operation now heightens concerns that Tehran is seeking to turn the West Bank into the next flashpoint in the long-running shadow war between Israel and Iran. That conflict has taken on new urgency this month, risking a wider conflict in the Middle East, as Iran vowed to retaliate over an Israeli strike on an embassy building that killed seven commanders in the Iranian armed forces.
Many weapons smuggled into the West Bank travel largely on two paths from Iran through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel, the officials said. As weapons cross borders, the officials added, they change hands among a multinational cast that can include members of organized crime gangs, extremist fighters, soldiers and intelligence agents. A key group in the operation, Iranian officials and analysts said, are Bedouin smugglers who smuggle the weapons across the border from Jordan to Israel.
The New York Times interviewed senior security and government officials with knowledge of Iran’s effort to move weapons into the West Bank, including three from Israel, three from Iran and three from the United States. Officials from all three countries spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss secret operations they were not authorized to speak about publicly.
“The Iranians wanted to flood the West Bank with weapons and used criminal networks in Jordan, the West Bank and Israel, mostly Bedouins, to move and sell the products,” said Matthew Levitt, director of the counterterrorism program at the Institute. of Washington on Near East Policy, a research organization, and the author of a study on the smuggling route.
Smuggling into the West Bank, analysts said, began about two years ago when Iran began using previously established routes to smuggle other goods. It is unclear exactly how many weapons have reached the region in that time, although analysts say the majority are small arms.
In the months following Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel from Gaza, Israeli security forces conducted a large-scale crackdown in the West Bank.
The Israeli military describes the raids as part of its counter-terrorism effort against Hamas and other armed factions to eliminate weapons and fighters. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, including those accused of attacking Israelis, according to the United Nations, in one of the deadliest periods in decades.
Human rights groups say many Palestinians are being unjustly detained, particularly those held in Israeli prisons without formal trial. They say it is unclear how many of those arrested have genuine militant links.
“These arrests include many being swept up for reasons that are unclear,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “The Israeli government has a long history of abusive detention, arbitrary arrests and detention of people for exercising their basic rights.”
For years, Iran’s leaders have proclaimed the necessity of arming Palestinian fighters in the occupied West Bank. Iran has long supplied weapons to attack Israel to militants elsewhere in the region, members of its so-called Axis of Resistance, including its two main Palestinian allies in Gaza, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Both of these groups, which also operate in the West Bank, are designated terrorist organizations by the United States, the European Union, Israel and other countries.
Iranian officials said Tehran had not singled out a specific group for its largesse, choosing instead to generally flood the region with weapons and ammunition.
Afshon Ostovar, an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and an expert on Iran’s military, said Iran was focusing on the West Bank because it understood that access to Gaza would be limited in the near future.
“The West Bank should really be the next frontier that Iran will penetrate and proliferate, because if they are able to do that, then the West Bank will become as big a problem, if not bigger, than Gaza. “, he said. .
Fatah, the Palestinian faction that controls the Palestinian Authority and with it much of the West Bank, accused Iran last week of trying to “exploit” Palestinians for its own ends by spreading chaos in the territory. In a statement, Fatah said it would not allow Iran to exploit “our sacred goal and the blood of our people”.
In a statement, Iran’s UN mission did not comment on the smuggling operation, but stressed what it said was the importance of Palestinians taking up arms against Israel.
“Iran’s assessment posits that the only effective way to resist the occupation by the Zionist regime is armed resistance,” said Amir Saeid Iravani, the country’s UN ambassador. “The Palestinian resistance forces have the ability to manufacture and procure the necessary weaponry for their purpose.”
Even after October 7, as Iran’s proxies increasingly launched attacks from Lebanon and Yemen, Tehran and Jerusalem preferred to keep much of their conflict in the shadows. But this covert war exploded into public view last week with the airstrike on the Iranian embassy building in Syria.
Israeli warplanes on April 1 attacked a meeting of leaders from Iran’s armed forces and members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Damascus, Iranian officials said. Among the dead was General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, 65, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general in charge of Iran’s covert operations in Syria and Lebanon, through which parts of the arms smuggling trail pass, Israelis, Iranians said. and American officials.
This attack came after another Israeli airstrike. On March 26, Israeli forces struck a key smuggling route hub in eastern Syria, according to US and Iranian officials and two of the Israeli officials.
The majority of contraband weapons, analysts said, are handguns such as handguns and assault rifles. Iran also smuggles advanced weapons, according to US and Israeli officials. Those weapons, Israeli officials said, include anti-tank missiles and rocket launchers, which fly fast and low to the ground, creating a challenge for Israel when defending civilian and military targets from close-range fire.
Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, said in a statement that it recently seized advanced military equipment smuggled into the West Bank. The Shin Bet “takes involvement in activities directed by Iran and its affiliates very seriously and will continue to take active measures at all times to monitor and prevent any activity that endangers the security of the State of Israel.”
Working with its militant allies and established criminal networks, Iran uses two main routes to get weapons into the West Bank, Israeli, Iranian and US officials said.
Along one route, Iranian-backed fighters and Iranian agents are transporting weapons from Syria to Jordan, the officials said. From there, Iranian officials added, they are taken across the border to Bedouin smugglers. The nomads take the weapons to the border with Israel, where they are collected by criminal gangs who then take them to the West Bank.
The Iranian effort taps into an established smuggling route into Jordan, which shares a porous 300-mile border with Israel. Last year, a Jordanian lawmaker was charged in Amman, Jordan, after he was arrested in 2022 trying to smuggle more than 200 weapons into the West Bank. The source of the weapons is not clear.
One of the Iranian officials said that increased security since October 7, by both Israel and Jordan, has increased the risk of arrest, especially for Bedouins and Arab-Israelis who play a critical role in their ability to cross the borders.
A second, more challenging route bypasses Jordan and moves the weapons from Syria to Lebanon, two US officials said. From there, many of the weapons are smuggled into Israel, where criminal gangs collect them and transport them to the West Bank.
The route through Lebanon, Mr. Levitt said, is more difficult, especially since the war in Gaza began, because the border where Hezbollah operates is more heavily patrolled by both the Israeli military and UN peacekeepers.
Much of the work coordinating the smuggling route is done by Iranian agents of the Quds Force, the Revolutionary Guards’ foreign intelligence service, according to two of the Iranian officials with ties to the Guards.
In addition to killing General Zahedi, the Israeli strike on the Iranian embassy building in Damascus last week killed two other Quds Force generals and four other officers, Iran said, making it one of the deadliest attacks of the shadow war.
The US officials and two of the Israeli officials said a series of raids in Syria a week earlier targeted two Iranian intelligence units involved in smuggling. One unit, known as Division 4000, is directly supervised by the Revolutionary Guards. The other, Division 18840, is operated by the Quds Force.
Days before the Israeli attack on the embassy building in Damascus, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave his personal stamp of approval to Palestinian militants who receive many of Iran’s weapons. In Tehran, he met with the leaders of two armed groups: Ziyad al-Nakhalah of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas.
Ayatollah Khamenei, who years ago publicly ordered the arming of the West Bank, told both leaders, according to state media, that Iran would not hesitate to support the Palestinians and their cause.
“It would not be easy for the Palestinian people to endure this battle if it were not for Iran’s continuous and consistent support at all political, military and security levels,” Mr al-Nakhalah said in a speech in Tehran.
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
