Postmarked Tehran

Ariel Sharon stood on the dock at Israel's Red Sea port Eilat. Arrayed around him were row upon row of rifles, rockets, missiles and ammunition. Israeli commandos had snatched the weapons from a boat Israel claims was smuggling the arms to the Palestinian Authority. Sharon accused Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat of wanting to blow up the faint, remaining hopes of peace with this lethal, 50-ton haul. But it was not for Arafat, whom Sharon consistently calls a terrorist, that the Israeli Prime Minister had his bitterest words. Those he reserved for Iran, which Israel maintains was the supplier of the cache. Acts like that make Iran "the center of world terror," said Sharon.

Arafat at first denied that the Palestinian Authority had any connection to the guns Israel took off the Tongan-registered freighter Karine A. Then, pressured by the U.S. and the European Union, he ordered an inquiry that blamed three Palestinian officials. That the P.A. was involved was no shock, given the Authority's established record of smuggling arms. But the Iranian angle is something new. Last week senior Israeli officials detailed to TIME their evidence of an Iranian connection to the Karine A. If indeed Iran sent arms to the P.A.--which Iran emphatically denied--Arafat would appear now to have a powerful regional backer in his struggle with Israel, a development likely to work against efforts toward peace. "An Iranian-Palestinian connection is not good news," says a U.S. official in the region, with deadpan understatement.

Commandos from Israel's Navy SEALS unit, Shayetet 13, swooped down on the Karine A in international waters of the Red Sea on the night of Jan. 3, catching most of the 13 crew members asleep. The Israelis say the crew told them the weapons were loaded onto the Karine A from boats off the Iranian coast in an operation headed by Lebanese Hajj Bassem, an assistant to the notorious terrorist Imad Mughniyah. A leader of the Lebanese militia Hizballah, Mughniyah has close ties to Iran and is blamed by the Americans for the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. Israeli intelligence tells TIME the captured captain of the ship, Omar Akawi, a maritime adviser to the Palestinian Transportation Ministry, identified a photo of Bassem as that of the man who delivered the cargo. Akawi also confessed to Israeli interrogators that the weapons were intended for the P.A.

On the ship, the Israelis say, they found the weapons in 83 giant barrels, each 12-ft. long by 4-ft. wide. The barrels had dense air pockets at each end enabling them to float and adjustable valves so that they could hang just beneath the surface of the sea. The plan, the Israelis say, was for a frogman named Salaam as-Skandari, a Palestinian trained by Hajj Bassem, to guide them to the Gaza shore. As-Skandari, along with the rest of the crew, are in Israeli detention.

Had the munitions reached their apparent destination, they would have considerably upgraded the arsenal of the P.A., which is known to have only light arms and crude mortars. Onboard the Karine A were Katyusha rockets, Sagger antitank missiles, Dragunov sniper rifles, advanced mortars and C-4 plastic explosives. The serial numbers had been scratched off the weapons to prevent identification, but Israeli officials tell TIME the cargo included antitank mines and rocket-propelled grenades of a design manufactured only in Iran.