Iran will respond promptly to any threat against its security, a foreign ministry spokesman said on Monday, as the United States, Israel and Britain blamed Tehran for an attack on an Israeli-managed tanker off the coast of Oman.

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"The Islamic Republic of Iran has no hesitation in protecting its security and national interests and will respond promptly and strongly to any possible adventure," state television quoted Saeed Khatibzadeh as saying.

It said Khatibzadeh "strongly regretted the baseless accusations made by the British Foreign Secretary against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which were repeated by the US Secretary of State in the same context and contained contradictory, false and provocative accusations."

"Although Iran considers the threats of Western officials and the Zionist regime [Israel] to be more of a propaganda gesture, any action against Iran's national interests and security will be met with a strong and decisive response," an unnamed official told Nournews news agency on Monday.

"And Washington and London will be directly responsible for the consequences," the official told Nournews, which is close to Iran's Supreme National Security Council.

Also Monday, UK Minister for the MIddle East James Cleverly summoned Iran's ambassador to the Foreign Office on Monday in response to the attack on the Mercer Street, which killed a British national and Romanian.

"Minister Cleverly reiterated that Iran must immediately cease actions that risk international peace and security, and reinforced that vessels must be allowed to navigate freely in accordance with international law,'' the Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office said in a statement.

On Sunday, the US, the UK, and Russia gave Israel the "green light" to attack Iranian targets following a deadly drone strike last Friday on an Israeli-owned cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman, the Kuwait-based newspaper Al-Jarida reported, quoting American officials.

 Both the US and UK joined Israel in alleging that Iran carried out the fatal drone strike on the oil tanker Mercer Street, putting further pressure on Tehran as it denied being involved in the assault.

Calling it an "unlawful and callous attack," British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said his country and its allies planned a coordinated response over the strike Thursday night on the oil tanker Mercer Street.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken soon followed, saying there was "no justification for this attack, which follows a pattern of attacks and other belligerent behavior."

The strike on the Mercer Street marked the first-known fatal attack after years of assaults on commercial shipping in the region linked to tensions with Iran over its tattered nuclear deal.

While no one has claimed responsibility for the attack, Iran and its militia allies have used so-called "suicide" drones in attacks previously, which crash into targets and detonate their explosive payloads.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett went further than Blinken and Raab in his remarks Sunday at a cabinet meeting, saying: "I declare unequivocally: Iran is the one that carried out the attack on the ship." He then accused Tehran of "trying to shirk responsibility" for the attack and called its denial "cowardly."

He then made a point to stare directly into the camera and slowly warn: "We know, at any rate, know how to convey the message to Iran in our own way."

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Recent reports suggest that the United States is disturbed by aspects of the Israeli-Iranian shadow war raging across the region – in this case, at sea. It seems reasonable to conclude that Washington is trying to lower tensions it fears can spoil attempts to negotiate a new nuclear agreement with Tehran.

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American sources told The Wall Street Journal in recent days that since 2019, Israel allegedly attacked 12 ships illegally carrying Iranian oil to Syria, using weapons such as limpet mines to damage the vessels.

The report came amid signs of a possible escalation between Israel and Iran on the seas, suggesting that the information was designed to send a signal to Israel to cool down the alleged maritime operations.

It also surfaced at about the time Iran accused Israel of attacking an Iranian container ship in the eastern Mediterranean Sea last week named the Shahr e Kord, causing a fire.

That attack came days after Israel said Iran was behind an attack on an Israeli-owned cargo ship, the MV Helios Ray, in the Gulf of Oman.

Israel's alleged covert campaign at sea is part of a much larger campaign, dubbed by the defense establishment as the "campaign between the wars," designed to prevent the radical Iranian axis from building up its military and terrorist power in the region but to do so without crossing the threshold of regional war.

It is a delicate balancing act that has enabled Israel to curb alarmingly ambitious Iranian schemes, pioneered by the former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, to use the air, land and sea to flood Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and other areas with precision-guided missiles, weapons factories, well-armed militias and the creation of new "rings of fire" around Israel.

Jerusalem has created a powerful intelligence-gathering machine that is able to detect many of these activities in real-time and disrupt them, using an array of precision airstrikes, special operations, cyber technology and other means. Most of these activities remain hidden from public view.

Cash payments from Damascus to Beirut

So why have oil tankers that are moving Iranian oil to Syria become an alleged target?

According to a recent analysis by Yediot Aronoth's veteran military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai, Iranian oil-smuggling to Syria began even before the Trump administration placed sanctions on Iranian oil exports in May 2018 (when Trump withdrew from the former nuclear agreement), and before the United States slapped sanctions on Syrian President Bashar Assad and his regime for its countless war crimes.

However, since May 2018, when the Iranians faced restrictions on transferring funds through the international financial network, they faced a new obstacle: How to get paid for smuggled oil to countries such as Syria?

They found a work-around: The Assad regime began paying its oil debts directly to Iran's proxy Hezbollah, enabling Iran to launder its terror financing in new, convenient ways, and to continue its backing of Hezbollah's force build-up programs, according to Ben-Yishai.

To get around America's Caesar Act, which bans international transactions with Syrian banks, as well as with Lebanese banks that work with their Syrian counterparts, the Assad regime was able to smuggle cash payments from Damascus to Beirut with ease.

As part of this scheme, oil tankers are loaded up at Iranian ports in the Persian Gulf or at Qeshm island in the Strait of Hormuz and then proceeded to sail via various routes toward the Syrian coastline, where, while still at sea, they rendezvous with Syrian ships and transfer their oil cargo, or alternatively, directly dock at Syria's Latakia or Tartus ports and unload their oil cargo.

With these journeys forming a key part of Iran's radical axis financing, Israel may have decided that as part of its campaign between the wars, it was time to disrupt this Hezbollah financing channel.

The Iranians, likely fed up with such operations, retaliated at the end of February by targeting the Israeli-owned cargo ship, and Israel may have decided to boost its own deterrence by targeting the Shahr e Kord in response.

'Part of Iranian pirate activities to circumvent sanctions'

This apparent escalation seems to have set off alarm bells in the Biden administration, likely resulting in the leaked information to the Wall Street Journal about this previously unknown aspect of the campaign between the wars.

A question that remains unanswered is how the ecological disaster caused by an oil spill off the Israeli coastline in late February – which has been linked by Israel's Environmental Protection Ministry to a ship illegally smuggling oil from Iran to Syria – fits into this picture.

Environmental Protection Minister Gila Gamliel said Iran was behind the spill, accusing it of "ecological terrorism," though Israel's defense establishment has not confirmed this is indeed the case.

Meanwhile, dispelling rumors that Israel itself was accidentally responsible for the spill as part of its campaign against Iranian oil tankers, Defense Minister Benny Gantz firmly dismissed this theory.

Presumably relying on an array of intelligence reports, Gantz said on Sunday, "I can tell you emphatically that Israel is not responsible for the oil spill that caused the considerable damage along the coast."

The cause of the spill, therefore, remains a mystery.

"We are moving into the water arena. This is one of the arenas of conflict between Iran and Israel," Professor Uzi Rabi, director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, observed on Sunday.

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"This is part of Iran's pirate activities at sea to circumvent sanctions and sell oil," he said, adding that Hezbollah and Iranian militias in Syria gain the return benefit.

The wider context, he said, is that Iran is gathering negotiating "bargaining chips" ahead of talks with Washington. Describing the "Iranian paradox," Rabi said that "the worse things are inside Iran, the more they 'purchase' bargaining chips on the outside."

As the region waits to see how Washington and Tehran engage, Israel's defensive shadow war can be expected to continue, even though it might be adjusted to avoid angering America at this sensitive time.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Israel has targeted at least a dozen Iranian oil ships bound for Syria since 2019, according to a new report published by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

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Multiple unnamed officials from the US and the Middle East told the WSJ that the vessels had been hit out of concern that oil profits from the cargo would go to fund extremism in the Middle East.

The strikes reportedly began in late 2019, employing weaponry such as water mines as ships traveled from the Red Sea and other parts of the region towards Syria.

US officials also claimed that some of the cargo carried Iranian weaponry destined for the Syrian government.

Israel has not commented on the WSJ report.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, has admitted that the IDF has carried out hundreds of airstrikes in Syria, mostly targeting Iranian military infrastructure and Hezbollah units.

The fresh reporting potentially unveils a new dimension in Israel's efforts to stop Iran from enlarging its influence in the region and comes amid soaring tensions between the two bitter enemies as the Biden administration looks to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Earlier Thursday, social media users reported an attack on an Iranian cargo ship in the Mediterranean, which they claimed had been ignored by state media outlets. Discourse on Iranian social media accused Israel of the attack.

This article was first published by i24NEWS.

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"Islamic countries... are today stronger than before as shown by the seizure of the British oil tanker or the downing of the US drone which violated Iran's territory -- which are milestones in the history of Muslims' struggle," said Ali Akbar Velayati, Khamenei's foreign policy adviser, according to Fars.

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Also on Tuesday, the commander of Iran's navy, Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi, declared that Iran was keeping close tabs on American vessels in the Persian Gulf and had an archive of images of their maritime movements.

The Young Journalists Club reported Khanzadi saying, "We observe all enemy ships, particularly [those of] America, point-by-point from their origin until the moment they enter the region" and that the images were recorded using Iranian drones.

"We have complete images and a large archive of the daily and moment-by-moment traffic of the coalition forces and America," Khanzadi said.

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Two oil tankers owned by Saudi Arabia and two others – one owned by the United Arab Emirates and another by Norway – were sabotaged last week.

The accusation comes as U.S. Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo briefed members of Congress on Capitol Hill on Tuesday behind closed doors.

Shanahan told reporters outside the Pentagon on Tuesday that the Iranian threat is "on hold" due to additional American forces in the Gulf, including a carrier striker group and a Patriot missile battery.

"Our prudent response, I think, has given the Iranians time to recalculate," he said before meetings with presidents of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands.

"That doesn't mean that the threats that we've previously identified have gone away," added Shanahan. "I think our response was a measure of our will and our resolve that we will protect our people and our interests in the region."

This article is reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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"The events that took place in the Emirates were Israeli mischief," Behrouz Nemati said, without providing any details on what role Israel may have played in the attacks.

Saudi Arabia said on Monday that two of its oil tankers were among those attacked off the coast of the Emirates and described it as an attempt to undermine the security of crude supplies amid tensions between the United States and Iran.

The UAE said on Sunday that four commercial vessels were sabotaged near Fujairah emirate, one of the world's largest bunkering hubs lying just outside the Strait of Hormuz. It did not describe the nature of the attack or say who was behind it.

Meanwhile, satellite images obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday showed no major visible damage to the vessels.

Details of the alleged sabotage to two Saudi, one Norwegian and one Emirati oil tanker on Sunday remained unclear, and Gulf officials have declined to say who they suspected was responsible. But it demonstrated the raised risks for shippers in a region vital to global energy supplies as tensions are increasing between the U.S. and Iran over its unraveling nuclear deal with world powers.

The U.S. has warned sailors of the potential for attacks on commercial sea traffic, and regional allies of the United Arab Emirates condemned the alleged sabotage as the tankers were off the coast of the UAE port city of Fujairah.

A U.S. official in Washington, without offering any evidence, told the AP that an American military team's initial assessment indicated Iran or Iranian allies used explosives to blow holes in the ships.

The official, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation, agreed to reveal the findings only if not quoted by name. The U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, which patrols the Middle East and operates from a base in Fujairah, has repeatedly declined to comment.

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The report included footage apparently from a Guard drone that flew over the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and another U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf. The images show fighter planes parked on the carrier deck.

Tasnim did not say when the footage was shot.

The development comes after the U.S. government earlier this month designated the Guard as a terrorist group to increase pressure on Iran and further isolate the country. Iran responded by labeling all U.S. forces as terrorists.

Lt. Chloe J. Morgan, a U.S. Naval Forces Central Command spokesperson, said in an email that the Eisenhower has not been in the Persian Gulf since 2016. She said the U.S. and its allies are committed to freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.

The strait, which sees nearly a third of all oil traded by sea pass through it, has been the scene of past confrontations between the U.S. and Iran, including a one-day naval battle in 1988.

In recent years, the U.S. Navy has accused Iranian patrol boats of harassing American warships in the waterway.

The drone that took the footage is an Ababil-3 with an eight-hour flight capability at 12,000 feet (3,658 meters) and a 250-kilometer (160-mile) range.

The Trump administration said Monday that it will no longer exempt any countries from U.S. sanctions if they continue to buy Iranian oil, stepping up pressure on Iran in a move that primarily affects the five remaining major importers: China and India and U.S. treaty allies Japan, South Korea and Turkey. The move is part of the administration's "maximum pressure" campaign on Iran that aims to eliminate all of its revenue from oil exports, which the U.S. says are used to destabilize the region.

Iran reiterated its long-running threat to close the Strait of Hormuz if it's prevented from using the crucial waterway in the Persian Gulf, through which about a third of all oil traded at sea passes.

In 2016, Iran's navy similarly took video footage of the nuclear-powered carrier USS Harry Truman, based in Norfolk, Virginia, while it was in the Persian Gulf region launching airstrikes and supporting operations against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

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