The forgotten history of the Iranian weapons reaching Gaza by sea

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 with helping the Palestinian resistance organizations with training, logistical, military and economic means, and transforming a movement that resisted with stone to one with a self-reliant arsenal of missiles, rockets, anti-tank weapons, thermobaric RPGs and improvised explosives, capable of 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, under conditions of genocide where the Zionist enemy dropped bombs worth the equivalent of 7 Hiroshimas on Gaza, still not being able to defeat the resistance or retrieve its captive soldiers.

Hamas 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 was part of the Quds Force's division of labor, where a number of Brigadier-Generals under Soleimani's command were tasked with helping each resistance movement in the region, embedding themselves among its fighters and becoming an integral part of them: Haj Ramadan was indeed "more Palestinian than the Palestinians" (in the words of 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 a member of Hezbollah's Shura Council for decades, was "more Lebanese than the Lebanese." Similarly was Martyr Hamid Taghavi "more Iraqi than the Iraqis" or Martyr Sayyid Razi Mousavi "more Syrian than the Syrians." The role that Imam Khamenei assigned to the Quds Force on its creation in 1990 is that of an elite vanguard of the international Islamic revolution, a special forces command that is responsible for training Mujahideen from around the world and occasionally fighting next to them for liberation, from the battlefields of Bosnia, Sudan and Somalia in the 1990s, to those of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon in the 21st 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 for the sake of helping the Palestinians resist occupation? This article is concerned with giving the details of that operation.

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 instead cost Rabin his life, who was assassinated in 1995 by a far-right Jewish settler, and the belligerent right-wing Netanyahu government that had won the Israeli elections in 1996 had 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 the Palestinians that armed struggle was more effective against the Zionist entity than negotiations. The election campaign in Israel was characterized by the inflammatory rhetoric of right-wing opposition leader Ariel Sharon against the centrist government of Ehud Barak. Sharon provocatively invaded the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem with his guard, the third holiest site for Muslims after Mecca and Medina, and when, a few days later, a young Palestinian child was murdered by Israeli bullets in Ramallah in the West Bank, the final straw had come: the Second Intifada, the second popular uprising of the Palestinians, had just broken out.

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 peace talks with Israel, the Palestinian national leader had already gained political (though not military) control of the West Bank and Gaza—and plenty of weapons—and could take more in the future. But at almost every major peace-deal signing ceremony, he felt uneasy. He kept thinking back to his days as a rebel, a fighter who always kept a gun close to him. The problem was that weapons weren’t enough against the Israelis. Now he had a new idea. What if his Palestinian forces could get rockets? If he could start firing Iranian-made Katyusha rockets at a major Israeli city near the Gaza Strip like Ashkelon, then he could extract a whole new set of concessions from Israel regarding the future borders of Palestine. Then he could also return to the negotiating table with the new concessions and see if what he wanted would be enough or if he would have to fight again, perhaps with even bigger rockets. To make all this happen, in early 2001 Arafat held a meeting with key senior PLO officials who managed its arsenal. These 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 would recruit 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 for him to obtain powerful weapons and financial and logistical support from two of Israel's powerful enemies - Iran and Hezbollah.

For this plan, Iran and Hezbollah would pay for 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 commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Major General Qassem Soleimani, although it appears that the head of Hezbollah’s military wing was the original mastermind. However, before the operation began, Hezbollah and the Iranian Guards came up with a clever plan to distract the Israeli Navy: They would pay for special floating tubes to be designed that could accommodate the weapons. They would then train PLO personnel in Iran in scuba diving and how to use the tubes. The Palestinian Authority simply had to buy a ship and hire a crew to pick up the weapons from Iran. In return, Arafat simply had to agree to allow some of the pro-Iranian Palestinian resistance organizations (Hamas and Islamic Jihad) to operate in PA areas. He would still have control and could always start arresting them again whenever he wanted. It was a great deal. 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 would be trained in the handling of the special Iranian floating containers. For the small price of letting Iran carry out certain activities in the Palestinian Authority territories, Arafat would receive game-changing weapons. And 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 of course he could not accept, since in this plan East Jerusalem would continue to be cut in two, with Jewish settlements passing through Arab neighborhoods, and Arafat said that the Palestinian leader who would sell even an inch of Jerusalem's territory had not yet been born. Now Arafat was faced with the new Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, his enemy since the First Lebanon War in 1982. Sharon, the “butcher of Sabra and Shatila,” this pyromaniac terrorist, as the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman called him, knew Arafat. Back in his days in Lebanon, Arafat had a reputation for sending flowers to the families of those Lebanese opponents he had killed. He had a kind of delicacy. Sharon simply destroyed his opponents and danced on their graves. Therefore, there was no way for Israel’s far-right new Prime Minister to grant the Palestinians statehood through negotiations, so the only option left was armed confrontation. Arafat felt that the only way to embarrass Sharon would be to surprise him with high-quality weapons for which he was not prepared—namely, rockets from Iran.

Arafat’s top officers each presented different aspects of the arms procurement plan. There were risks, but Iran would put up most of the money and weapons. When the ship carrying the weapons arrived anywhere near Israel, it would unload the weapons. This next plan was a brilliant one. Arafat ordered Subaki to raise and disperse the necessary funds to purchase the ships and hire the various crew members he needed. He ordered Mughrabi to begin recruiting key crew members, including Akawi. He also ordered Mughrabi and Haris to coordinate with Hezbollah and the Guards to move forward with their assistance in the operation.

Arafat and Sharon had become lifelong enemies in Beirut in 1982, eighteen years earlier. In 1982, a much younger Arafat was at the height of his military power. He had led the Palestinian national movement and a series of armed resistance operations against Israel since the late 1960s. By 1968, Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had moved into large swaths of Lebanon, where the population was predominantly Palestinian. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lived in refugee camps there after the Nakba (ethnic cleansing, Arabic for catastrophe) of 1948. The PLO effectively used these areas as a Palestinian state-within-a-state within Lebanon, and as a springboard for launching armed resistance operations inside Israel during the 1970s. Arafat remembered that time with melancholy. He may not have had the same legitimacy then that he would enjoy in 2000, having already become a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, but in those wild years of the 1970s he controlled a significant area and had powerful forces at his command. However, he and Sharon eventually ended up in a wider war that would bind them together forever. In August 1981, then-Israeli Defense Minister Sharon was laying the groundwork for the installation of a pro-Zionist Maronite government in Lebanon and the ouster of Arafat. On June 6, 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. Sharon ordered Israeli troops to advance beyond a designated line approved by the Israeli cabinet so that they could encircle Arafat and lay siege to Beirut on June 13, 1982. Sharon did not simply want to attack the PLO, he wanted to assassinate Arafat. Israel bombed parts of Beirut, and Mossad sent agents to carry out car bomb attacks against the PLO, under the name of the "Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners", an organization that was little more than a front for the Mossad and the Shin Bet, consisting of Lebanese traitors (including the nephew of the infamous Lebanese-American neoconservative pseudo-intellectual Fouad Ajami, who also had a role in the murder of prominent Shia cleric, Sheikh Rsgheb Harb, in 1984). When the United States proposed a ceasefire agreement on August 10, 1982, Sharon ordered a carpet bombing of Beirut, killing 20,000 Lebanese civilians and instilling the justified hatred of Israel in millions of Lebanese. Some experts say he was trying to murder Arafat before the ceasefire took effect. On August 12, the Israeli cabinet stripped Sharon of the authority to order attacks without its approval, and American officials pressed for a quick ceasefire. Under the agreement between Israel and the PLO, Sharon was forced to allow Arafat and his armed Fedayeen to leave Lebanon for Tunis. Sharon said in a 2002 interview that, with Arafat in his grasp, he wished he had gotten rid of him in 1982. However, the Israeli cabinet and the Americans had effectively tied his hands. After the ceasefire, Sharon got into trouble with the Israeli cabinet for exceeding his authority in invading Lebanon to target Arafat. He also got into trouble because his invasion led to the massacre of 3,500 Palestinian civilians by pro-Zionist Maronites in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in September. Sharon was eventually forced to resign as defense minister and stayed out of major political positions from 1983 to 1998.

Sharon finally emerged from the shadows in 1998 when then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed him Foreign Minister. He then became leader of the right-wing Likud party when Netanyahu lost the 1999 elections. Sharon completed his comeback in 2001, winning the election as Prime Minister. In a 2002 interview as Prime Minister, Sharon made it clear that he believed that a huge number of Israeli lives would have been saved from "terrorist operations" (as he called armed resistance operations) if he had been able to end Arafat's reign in 1982. By this he implied that the First and Second Intifadas would not have happened if Arafat had been murdered - so little did he understand the real causes of Palestinian resentment!

Exile in Tunis, meanwhile, had kept Arafat away from the Levantine neighborhood for years. He remembered the years of exile bitterly and desired his own revenge. Yet he remained the undisputed, elected Palestinian leader by consensus, and made his comeback years before Sharon. A significant twist came from Arafat’s expulsion from Lebanon: it left a twenty-year-old, talented Lebanese Shiite fighter, a member of Fatah, unemployed, who was now looking for a new direction. This young Shiite was no ordinary recruit, as Fatah was a Sunni-dominated Palestinian organization. Despite being neither Palestinian nor Sunni, the young Shiite had quickly risen through the ranks of Fatah’s elite Force 17, where he was assigned to be Arafat’s bodyguard and the bodyguard of other top Fatah officials, to protect them from assassination attempts, that is, to become an expert in thwarting hostile Mossad plans. This young Lebanese Shiite mujahid's name was Imad Mughniyeh, and he would become the fiercest, most unrivaled enemy of the CIA and Mossad for some twenty-five years. Born in 1962, the Lebanese Mughniyeh became close to Arafat during the brief time Arafat was still in Lebanon and when Mughniyeh was old enough to join a military unit (16, which in West Asia is, practically though not officially, the age of conscription). (These close ties from their days in Lebanon would prove crucial eighteen years later, when Mughniyeh helped hatch a plan to supply weapons to the PLO and Arafat.) When Arafat left Lebanon, Mughniyeh did not remain unemployed for long. Iran recruited him to be part of an elite unit guarding then-Hezbollah spiritual mentor, Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. Thus, by 1982, Mughniyeh was a legend, the defender of the Ain al-Hilweh camp, which had delayed the Israeli army's advance on Beirut for ten days in June, and was also already known as the operational mastermind behind the kidnapping of the dean of the American University of Beirut, David Dodge, whom Mughniyeh's Islamic Jihad Organization kidnapped in July 1982 in hopes of exchanging him for four Iranian diplomats held hostage by the pro-Zionist Maronite Phalangists. Mughniyeh was the person to whom fate had given special ties to the PLO-Hezbollah-Iran triangle. From his elite positions as the Palestinian leader's bodyguard, Mughniyeh learned to pay incredible attention to detail and to be careful to avoid detection and assassination. These forces would be crucial in thwarting numerous attempts by the Mossad and CIA to assassinate him as he rose through the ranks to become Hezbollah’s military commander and the mastermind of its most audacious resistance attacks worldwide. Mughniyeh and Iran’s Qassem Soleimani became an unstoppable duo over the years. But as Mughniyeh became one of the world’s most senior guerrilla leaders, Arafat, for a time, took a different path, entering into historic peace negotiations with the Zionist entity.

When Arafat gained global fame as a warrior-turned-politician with the Oslo Accords in 1993, he too rose to new heights. Meanwhile, Sharon, whose return to political prominence did not occur until the late 1990s, watched from the sidelines. The peace process had created new realities on the ground: it had established Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in the West Bank as well as the Gaza Strip. Thus, Arafat's ability to support the Second Intifada was much more apparent than during the First, both because the PLO leader had received a wealth of new weapons for the Palestinian Authority police and because of his proximity to the "Israeli" border - while during the First Intifada Arafat and the PLO leadership were in Tunisia, far from Palestine, they were now geographically in a position from which they could also operationally support the Palestinians resisting the occupation of their lands. During this period, Arafat and Sharon were destined to face each other for a rematch of Beirut. This long-standing historical rivalry was the context in which Arafat's decision to secretly request rockets from Iran took place. Knowing that he was militarily weaker and facing a confrontation with Sharon, Arafat worked out deals with Mughniyeh, Hezbollah, and the Revolutionary Guards to increase the Palestinian arsenal. He hoped that his new friends (with whom he was connected by his former bodyguard, Mughniyeh) could even balance the forces or give him an advantage over his enemy, Ariel Sharon.

In a rare public moment on January 7, 2020, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wept, his voice shaking as he mourned in front of millions of Iranians. He was mourning the U.S. killing of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, four days earlier. Soleimani was Iran’s leading figure in spreading armed resistance against Americans and Zionists in West Asia. The Quds Force is an Iranian version of both the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA Special Activities Division, although Soleimani had far greater authority to export the revolution to foreign countries. Despite his humble origins, Soleimani, who referred to himself as "the smallest soldier" of the revolution, rose quickly through the ranks of the Guards thanks to his bravery and daring during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88. Much of the war was a failure for Iran, but Soleimani had achieved some rare victories through planning, creative strategy, and the sheer force of his personality. A true self-made man, Soleimani’s resourcefulness and legendary abilities spawned pro-Iranian movements, seemingly out of thin air, in countries across West Asia. Until his assassination, he was the point of reference for Iran’s allies in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere. In 2001, Soleimani, at the age of forty-three, was a legend that Khamenei had in his service to perform miracles against the Zionists, having played a significant role, as a military advisor to Hezbollah, in the expulsion of the Zionist occupation army from Lebanon in 2000. The general was deeply involved in planning the transfer of advanced weapons to the PLO and it was he who convinced Khamenei to give his approval for such an operation. Khamenei, then sixty-two, had already ruled the country as the Wali al-Faqih (Guardian Jurist) for twelve years, but he had much greater ambitions. He was developing Iran's peaceful nuclear program with the help of such great scientists as martyrs Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Dr. Mehdi Tehranchi, and Dr. Fereydoon Abbasi. There were also Shiite groups throughout West Asia that could eventually - by the 2010s - be transformed into pro-Iranian armies to tip the scales in favor of regional resistance against takfiri Wahhabi, Saudi-funded organizations like ISIS and al-Qaeda, in Syria and Iraq. After hundreds of years of predominantly Sunni dominance in the region, Khamenei had a moral duty to arm the Shias everywhere and prevent them from getting slaughtered, but also arm the Sunnis wherever they were oppressed, from Bosnia to Palestine. Hezbollah in Lebanon was already an example of a fantastic success. But in 2001, Khamenei thought about what would really make him shine throughout the Muslim world: becoming the champion of the Palestinians’ sacred cause of eliminating Zionist occupation from their lands. He wanted to restore the al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, to its former glory, seeing it liberated from the illegal Zionist occupation and the surrounding - also illegal - Jewish settlements. To achieve these goals, Khamenei, a man of religion, needed to count on men of action. Fortunately, he had two legends working for him - Soleimani and Hezbollah's Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh had already fooled the Mossad and the CIA countless times for about twenty years and would continue to do so for years to come. The magician-guerrilla had more than nine lives. Israeli intelligence knew that Mughniyeh had traveled to Iran sometime after Israel's expulsion from southern Lebanon on May 24, 2000. He had gone to Iran to gain the support of the Revolutionary Guards in creating a much more threatening front for Israel from Lebanon. With the Israeli army outside Lebanon, it would be much more difficult for Israel to prevent the movement of large rockets to Hezbollah. Also, if rockets were not being fired directly into Israel, the Israeli army was not willing to start another war in the marshes of southern Lebanon simply because of the movement of rockets to Hezbollah. After all, the reason for the Israeli army’s withdrawal from Lebanon was that it could not stand a continued confrontation with Hezbollah. Without Israeli intervention, the shipment of large rockets from Iran to Hezbollah would have brought a significant upgrade to the Lebanese organization’s arsenal. Years later, in 2006, Israel would learn the hard way, with hundreds of Zionist soldiers and settlers killed, about the effectiveness of the Mughniyeh-Soleimani plan to arm Hezbollah with powerful missiles.

In the summer of 2001, Israeli intelligence reported that either Mughniyeh himself or his top deputy, Haj Bassem, met with Guard and PLO representatives in the UAE and other locations to plan the secret arms supply plan. Previous meetings had taken place in Moscow and Oman in April 2000, according to Zionist intelligence, but Zionist intelligence cannot be certain of their timing or the exact messenger. However, since Mughniyeh generally delivered important messages only in person, either he or Bassem likely returned to Iran in 2000–2001 for additional meetings regarding the supply of arms to the Palestinian Authority. Khamenei would wait in his own offices as Mughniyeh met with top Iranian Guards officials. As head of state, he was not expected to meet Mughniyeh directly. But Mughniyeh expected to have a direct meeting with the head of the Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, and the commander of the Guards, Rahim Safavi. One of the military leaders of the Iran-Iraq War who participated in Iran’s foreign operations, Safavi became the powerful head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in 1997 and held the position until 2007. (Since then, Safavi has acted as Khamenei’s senior personal adviser on military matters. On September 23, 2019, Safavi warned the United States and Israel that “our defense force has reached the Mediterranean Sea and extends from the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean.”) He and Soleimani would then brief Khamenei directly. But the bond between Khamenei and Mughniyeh was as direct as possible even without their actual meeting. Mughniyeh was a major factor in Khamenei’s success in spreading the Islamic revolution and armed anti-American and anti-Zionist resistance throughout the region. What made Mughniyeh different was that he did not simply propose and carry out a tactical operation. That was the narrow-mindedness of normal military commanders. Mughniyeh’s bold brilliance lay in his broader strategic vision to change the rules of the game and the balance of power. His plan to secretly supply the Palestinians with rockets was based on his success in persuading Iran to send top-notch Iranian missiles into the hands of Hezbollah and the Palestinian Authority just in that moment when Arafat was getting fed up with the Zionist leadership’s deceptions. With Iranian missiles, Arafat could potentially lay waste to major "Israeli" cities like Ashkelon and beyond. And in 2001, the "Iron Dome" missile defense system was not even a dream. This plan, if successful, would be a strategic game-changer and would bring Israel to its knees more than any other event, Mughniyeh insisted.

Mughniyeh himself had come onto the radar screen of US and Zionist intelligence services literally with a bang: He was the mastermind behind the martyrdom operations against US and Zionist bases in Lebanon in 1983. When 241 US Marines were killed by a truck bomb packed with 5,400 kilograms of TNT, Mughniyeh was said to have watched through a telescope from a high-rise building. Some believe Mughniyeh was the father of the modern martyrdom operation. (Others say that the first to introduce suicide bombers to the field of modern warfare was the Palestinian Khalil al-Wazir - or Abu Jihad - during the repulsion of the Israeli attack on the Karameh refugee camp in Jordan in 1968, while a third view is that attacks of this type are an invention of the Tamil Tigers guerrilla movement in Sri Lanka.) A crucial link between Hezbollah and Iran, Mughniyeh participated in a variety of masterful guerrilla operations in the region and worldwide over the years. Numerous attempts by the CIA and Mossad to assassinate him all failed over the decades due to his brilliant secretive tactics and Hezbollah's famously disciplined intelligence network under Mughniyeh's leadership.

As the Second Intifada began in 2000, Mughniyeh and Soleimani helped persuade Khamenei to build a new alliance with Arafat to escalate attacks on Israel. In public speeches, Khamenei gave historical lectures about "the great Iranian nation that displays glory, sovereignty, and dignity" and about the nefarious influence of the United States in causing the country to "go backwards" during the pre-revolutionary rule of the Pahlavi dynasty. He demonstrated the popularity of his system based on significant turnout at pro-system rallies. After Safavi and Soleimani had held meetings with Mughniyeh and with his representatives, Khamenei realized that Mughniyeh and Soleimani were demanding large amounts of time, money, and resources. He would want assurances that the potential reward was worth the cost. Guards generals, Safavi and Soleimani, clearly convinced Khamenei that investing in Mughniyeh again, this time to help Arafat, was worth it. They told Khamenei that all Muslims in West Asia would praise his boldness and vision. Safavi and especially Soleimani had their own visions of spreading a much larger anti-imperialist revolutionary project throughout the region. Arafat would provide them with an important new footprint. Mughniyeh had already shared the details of the operation with Safavi and Soleimani, and Haj Bassem had spoken with Soleimani's deputy for Palestinian affairs in the Quds Force, Brigadier-General Haj Mohammad Saeed Izadi (alias Haj Ramadan) to make the sale. Many of Khamenei’s generals, who had become establishment figures and had stayed out of the war for over a dozen years after the end of hostilities with Iraq, were risk-averse. Mughniyeh, Soleimani, Izadi and Safavi, on the other hand, were always ready to take a gamble and put themselves in the line of fire personally: that was part of what convinced Khamenei. But the risk was not small. The Israeli Navy had improved its capabilities, and the capture of the Santorini ship in May 2001 showed that it was on the lookout for arms smuggling by sea. But Mughniyeh was one of the few military leaders who had managed to outwit the Zionists and even the Americans a lot of times. His bold new idea—to drop the weapons sealed in special floating tubes off the coast of Egypt before the Israeli Navy captured smuggling ships—was genius. Mughniyeh and Soleimani had also described to Iran’s supreme leader elaborate plans to conceal the name, flag, destination, and travel history of the ship they would use. The plan was not without risk, but it had a real chance of success by using the elements of surprise that Mughniyeh and Soleimani had devised. Zionist intelligence believed that Khamenei also appreciated the fact that Mughniyeh was covering his tracks: no Iranians would be on board at any point. There would be no conclusive proof or way to connect Iran to the ship if something went wrong and the Zionists seized the weapons. Khamenei gave Safavi and Soleimani the green light, which they would pass on to Izadi and Mughniyeh.

Izadi, Mughniyah and the “project manager” Bassem, had a secret meeting with the head of the PLO smuggling network, Adel Mughrabi, 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 he had acquired on some unspecified date a few months earlier, Akkawi, Mughrabi, and the other planners decided to use these boats to pick up the Iranian weapons and transport them to Gaza. In July 2001, Hezbollah and Iranian operatives conducted joint operations to construct floating sealed containers that could be dropped and stored just below the surface of the water until fishing boats could retrieve them. At the same time, they made efforts to find divers. Zionist intelligence knew in a very vague sense that the Iranians were conducting underwater experiments with equipment, but the Israelis could not connect this to the secret arms supply operation, nor did they know who the recipient of such a supply would be - it might not have been the Palestinians but Hezbollah. In August 2001, the PLO arms supply network began looking to purchase a large cargo ship. It eventually purchased the RIM K on August 31 from a Lebanese company, with the actual purchase being made by an Iraqi middleman on Mughrabi’s behalf. Meanwhile, Mughniyeh knew that Zionist intelligence agents had largely infiltrated PLO circles. However, his strategy with Iran was to continue to ship a steady stream of weapons through many ships, instead of loading all of them into one, on the assumption that, if not all, at least some would slip under the Zionists’ noses—as they eventually did. Given the ships' importance, he assigned his top aide, Bassem, to personally handle the delivery of the Iranian weapons to the PLO captain, Akawi. The Zionist intelligence, and especially the naval intelligence, was still in the dark. The agencies could instinctively sense that the Palestinian Authority was preparing a major covert arms procurement operation involving the Iranian Guards and Hezbollah. The Zionists were frustrated by their inability to establish a stable and functioning network of informants within the circles of this operation, and they worried that their failure to solve this riddle would lead to disaster.

Ultimately, of the ten ships filled with Iranian weapons destined for the Palestinian resistance, the Israelis managed to locate and capture the largest, the Karine A, in January 2002, and considered it their great victory. The remaining nine smaller ones reached Gaza and reinforced the arsenal of both the PLO and Hamas: what the Israelis did not know was that the operation had two axes, one was from Iran via Egypt, coordinated by Mughniyeh and Soleimani, and to which Karine A belonged, and the second - of which the Israelis were completely unaware - was the one via Lebanon, coordinated by Jihad Jibril, son of the Secretary-General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, Ahmad Jibril. Twenty years later, the new Secretary-General of the PFLP-GC, Talal al-Naji, would recount the details of the operation:

“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. 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. 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. Then, at a later stage, under the supervision of the martyr Qassem Soleimani, [it was decided] that our people who were resisting in Gaza should be able to manufacture weapons, even develop missiles. At the beginning, these weapons were very small - the missiles had a range of 2 kilometers, and their impact was weak. General Qassem Soleimani supervised the development of these missiles, in cooperation with the brothers in Syria. Sometimes the training took place in the Islamic Republic of Iran, sometimes in Syria, and sometimes in Lebanon, with the Hezbollah brothers. As you know, we are an axis - the axis of resistance. [Soleimani] supervised [these activities] himself. He supervised [these things] himself, as you know. This has been revealed by the beloved brother Hassan Nasrallah - how [Nasrallah] and Soleimani discussed the necessity of sending quality weapons to the fighters in the Gaza Strip. General Qassem Soleimani was the one who planned the delivery of the Kornet - the famous Russian missile used against tanks and heavy armored vehicles. [Kornet missiles] were sent to the Gaza Strip and the Zionist enemy was surprised by this, when its tanks were destroyed. The Israelis have a tank that they are proud of, they consider it the pride of the Israeli [arms] industry – the Merkava. Many [Merkava] tanks were destroyed in 2009, in the first war of Hamas with the Zionists in Gaza. This bears the mark and characteristics of General Qassem Soleimani, may he rest in peace.”

In late 2020, Lebanese revolutionary Anis al-Naqqash, who had started off as a Marxist-Leninist militant in the 1970s but converted to Shia Islam after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and became close friends with both Mughniyeh and Soleimani, also recalled these operations, recounting:

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. One of the most beautiful [arms transfer] operations took place in front of the eyes of the whole world, in front of the cameras of the Zionist enemy, in front of the Egyptian army and the Egyptian intelligence service, and in front of all the international media. How did it happen? A large amount of weapons was accumulated in El-Arish and in the Sinai region. Transporting these weapons to Gaza through the tunnels would take a long time, and the fighters inside Gaza were in a hurry, because they calculated that an [Israeli] attack was coming. We all remember how the people of Gaza, who were dying of hunger, broke through the Egyptian border fence [in January 2008] and entered El-Arish to get food, blankets, and equipment. Then, buses and trucks entered Gaza from Sinai, in plain sight, carrying not only food and blankets, but they were full of rockets and weapons. This is an example of the great thinking of Imad Mughniyeh and Qassem Soleimani."