Cargo ships and surveillance flights

The U.S. accused Iran of violating a U.N. arms embargo by allegedly shipping weapons to Hizballah. Britain stopped short of making a similar accusation; Philip Parham, the U.K.'s deputy ambassador to the U.N., said his country has "very serious concerns" about the shipment.

Bashar Ja'afari, the Syrian ambassador, denounced the accusations as "the usual Israeli outrageous concoction of lies."

Israel has yet to provide any real proof that the weapons were shipped from the Iranian government. This paragraph jumped out at me in the Jerusalem Post story about the debate.

Israel has not provided documentary evidence to back its claims that 36 containers of weapons hidden among hundreds of containers of civilian cargo on the Francop came from Iran and were headed for Lebanon's Hizbullah fighters via Syria. But its contention about the Iranian origin was bolstered by Iranian markings on the side of containers filled with rockets, missiles, mortars, anti-tank weapons and munitions shown to reporters in Israel.

A photo op isn't conclusive proof of anything; Israel needs to release some concrete evidence. There's already a lot of doubt in the region about the origin of these weapons, and the longer Israel delays, the more these doubts will flourish. (I'm not making any conclusions yet, precisely because of that lack of evidence.)

The debate also touched on Israeli military flights over Lebanon. Michael Williams, the U.N. special envoy for Lebanon, said the flights are violations of U.N. resolution 1701, which ended the summer 2006 war between Hizballah and Israel.

"Every single Israeli overflight of Lebanon is a violation," Williams said. "To the best of my knowledge, there's probably no other country in the world - probably, I may be wrong - which is subject to such an intrusive regime of aerial surveillance."

Williams recently finished a report on the implementation of 1701; it doesn't seem to be public yet.