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CAIRO: Two Iranian naval ships crossed the Suez Canal on Tuesday into the Mediterranean sea for the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution on a training mission that Israel calls a provocation.
“They are now in Mediterranean waters,” a canal official said. The patrol frigate Alvand and support ship Kharg are reportedly bound for Syria, a destination that would take them near Israeli waters.
The 1,500-tonne Alvand is normally armed with torpedoes and anti-ship missiles, while the larger 33,000-tonne Kharg has a crew of 250 and facilities for up to three helicopters, Iran's official Fars news agency has said.
Both ships were built in Britain during the 1970s for Iran, which ordered them before the Islamic revolution.
Neither ship is carrying chemical or nuclear material, Egypt's state-run MENA news agency has reported.
Their passage into the eastern Mediterranean, a week after the US aircraft carrier Enterprise transited the Suez Canal in the other direction, comes when popular uprisings in Arab nations are changing the political landscape of the Middle East and leaving Israelis worried about their security.
“We are talking about an unprecedented Iranian military presence in the Mediterranean, and that is a provocation to which the international community must react firmly,” foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told AFP.
On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the ships' arrival in the region as an Iranian power play, after his foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman branded their presence “a provocation.”
"Today we are witnessing the instability of the region in which we live and in which Iran is trying to profit by extending its influence by dispatching two warships to cross the Suez Canal," he said.
“Israel views with gravity this Iranian initiative and other developments that reinforce what we have said in past years about the Israel's security needs,” he added, according to a statement from his office.
