Olmert seen indicating role in Sudan attack: report

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Thursday that Israel acted "wherever we can" to strike at its enemies, but made no mention of a mystery attack on an arms smuggling convoy in Sudan two months ago.

The CBS News network said its security correspondent was told that Israeli aircraft had attacked the convoy in January, killing over 30 people, to block an arms delivery to the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza.

"We are taking action wherever we can strike terror infrastructure, in places that are nearby and not that close," Olmert said in a wide-ranging speech in Herzliya.

"We are hitting them, and in a way that strengthens deterrence and the image of deterrence -- which is sometimes no less important -- of the state of Israel."

"There's no point getting into details -- everyone can use his imagination. The fact is, whoever needs to know, knows. Whoever needs to know, knows there is no place where the state of Israel cannot act," the outgoing premier added.

Israeli media including the Ynet website described his remarks at hinting at Israeli involvement in the Sudan strike.

Military commentators said it never hurts to have your enemies believe you can carry out attacks over a great distance, as Israel's do, and that you do not hesitate to do so.

An Israeli official would neither confirm nor deny that Israel had carried out the attack in Sudan.

"We have major problems with Sudan as a source of contraband arms. The Egyptians cannot be relied upon to patrol that big, porous border," he said on condition of anonymity.

"Some in Egypt don't even recognize there is a border. We are also cognizant of the close ties between Egypt and Sudan that might make the former reluctant to act against the latter."

WEAPONS FOR HAMAS

According to a blog by the CBS correspondent, Israeli intelligence was said to have discovered that weapons were being trucked to Sudan and were to have been smuggled into the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip via Egypt.

Israeli forces pounded Gaza for three weeks in January, to halt rocket attacks by Palestinian militants and destroy the smuggling tunnels they build under the border with Egypt.

Israel signed an agreement with the United States in January that pledged international efforts to choke off arms smuggling. It has accused Iran of being a main weapons supplier to Gaza.

Eitan Ben-Eliyahu, a former chief of the Israeli air force, said Israel's air force was certainly capable of carrying out a 1,400-km (840-mile) roundtrip mission to Sudan.

"If the corridor is clear -- over the sea, for example, then it is easier, and you can re-fuel the aircraft in mid-air," Ben-Eliyahu told Army Radio.

"Sudan in general is not covered -- definitely most of its territory -- by radar defenses, and therefore they don't know you're coming into distant desert areas," he said.

Reports from Sudan quoted a lone survivor of the attack as saying two planes flew over the convoy then came back and shot up the "four or five" trucks.

Israel's air force has advanced missiles that can be fired from high altitude, possibly well outside a country's airspace, and coast into a target using optical data fed by satellites.

Low altitude visual identification would only be needed if it was necessary to verify the identity of the target.

Earlier this month, Olmert told his cabinet that Israel had carried out "countless major, important and decisive" covert operations during his term, Israeli political sources said.

In September 2007, Israeli aircraft bombed a site in Syria that U.S. intelligence said was a nearly completed secret nuclear reactor. Syria has said the target was a conventional military building.

In 1981, Israeli aircraft crippled Iraq's Osirak nuclear plant in a surprise long-range strike to prevent the late Saddam Hussein developing an atomic bomb.

(Additional reporting by Andrews Heavens)

(Reporting by Joseph Nasr and Dan Williams, Writing by Douglas Hamilton and Jeffrey Heller, editing by Tim Pearce)