Israel on Wednesday accused Iran of deliberately arranging a massive oil spill near its shores in early February.
Israeli Environment Minister Gila Gamliel said Iran was “carrying out terrorism by damaging the environment”, according to Reuters, adding that when “Iran damages the environment, it does not only harm the state of Israel”.
Israeli officials said the ship that caused the pollution was an oil tanker owned in Libya and suspected of smuggling oil from Iran to Syria.
More than 90% of Israel’s 120-kilometer-long Mediterranean coastline was covered with an estimated thousand tons of tar due to the spill, the Associated Press reported and it is one of the worst ecological disasters in the country’s history. Gamliel said the incident was a deliberate act of “environmental terror”, which promised to “provide compensation to all citizens of Israel.”
Iranian officials have not commented on this and the UN mission from Iran in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.
Israelites clear tar from the sand after a suspected oil spill covered Israel’s coast with tar on February 25, 2021 in Haifa, Israel.
Amir Levy / Getty Images
The allegations come Wednesday two days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Iran had attacked a cargo ship in Israel that was in the Gulf of Oman.
“It was indeed an act of Iran, it is clear,” Netanyahu told the Associated Press on Monday. “Iran is Israel’s biggest enemy. I’m determined to stop it. We’re hitting it all over the region.”
Tehran rejected the allegations.
Amid heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran over then-President Donald Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign and his decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal, the US accused Iran in 2019 of being behind attacks on oil tankers stand in the Gulf of Oman.
The controversial dynamics between the US and Iran have carried over to the Biden era, even as the new government wants to revive the 2015 agreement.
President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered airstrikes in Syria on militias that supported Iran in retaliation for a rocket attack in Irbil, Iraq, in mid-February in which a foreign contractor was killed and a number of Americans were injured. Biden said the strikes were intended to send a message to Iran to “be careful”, warning that Tehran could not act “with impunity”.
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