BEIRUT - Lebanon's Hezbollah on Thursday denied Israeli accusations that a huge shipment of "arms" seized by Israel was destined for the resistance group.
"Hezbollah staunchly denies any link to the weapons that the Zionist enemy has seized from the Francop ship," the resistance group said in a brief statement.
"At the same time Hezbollah denounces Israel's piracy in international waters," it added.
The Israeli military said it had seized the 137-metre (450-foot) Antigua-flagged vessel Francop before dawn on Wednesday around 100 nautical miles from the Israeli coast.
Both Iran and Syria on Wednesday rejected Israel's accusations.
At a joint news conference with his visiting Syrian counterpart Walid Muallem, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki dismissed the allegations out of hand, the state-run English-language broadcaster Press TV reported on its website.
Muallem echoed the denial. "The ship was not carrying Iranian-made weaponry for Syria or Lebanon" but was in fact carrying Syrian-made items for consumption in Iran, the website quoted the Syrian minister as saying.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that the arms seized were "further proof, if any is needed, that Iran is continuing to provide weapons" to Hezbollah.
"It is high time the international community put pressure on Iran," he added.
Israel waged a bloody 34-day war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 after Hezbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid that aimed to free Lebanese soldiers from Israeli prisons. The bodies of the soldiers were returned in a prisoner swap.
The war claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Hezbollah, originally a resistance group formed to counter an Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, had forced the Israeli military out of Lebanon in 2000. Israel, however, continues to occupy the Lebanese Shabaa Farms.
Israeli flights over Lebanon occur on an almost daily basis and are in breach of UN Security Council resolution 1710, which in August 2006 ended the war.
Tel Aviv claims that Tehran may develop its own nuclear weapon. Israel is the only country in the Middle East that actually has nuclear weapons, and wants to remain that way.
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is not liked in Tel Aviv because of his strong criticism of the long and brutal Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Although Ahmadinejad believes in the one state solution for the Middle East conflict, some media outlets have deliberately distorted his comments to claim that he seeks to wipe Israel off the map.
Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called for a democratic one-state solution for the Middle East conflict, which means that that Israel as a "colonial entity" or a "racist sate" will be "wiped off the map" and replaced by a state where Jews and Arabs live side by side peacefully and equally.
But Israeli officials and their media pundits kept misquoting the Iranian president, who has recently suggested that he even accepted the two-state solution, if it brings justice to all Palestinians.
After wiping Palestine off the map, Israel currently occupies the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem; the Lebanese Shabaa Farms and the Syrian Golan Heights.
Israel is also imposing a blockade (land, air, and sea) on the Palestinian Gaza Strip, where 1.5 million people are facing a humanitarian crisis. The besieged Strip is still considered under Israeli occupation, and Tel Aviv’s actions have been branded as “collective punishment” by human rights groups.
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