Why some ships vanish before unloading in the Middle East

On a radar map, the northern mouth of the Suez canal resembles a Bermuda Triangle-sur-Mer: ships have a habit of disappearing. So it was with the Emerald, an oil tanker which went through the canal on February 1st and vanished. Two days later it reappeared off the coast of Syria. What happened in the interim is now the focus of an international investigation.

Israel believes the Emerald was the source of an oil spill that has washed more than 1,000 tonnes of tar onto its Mediterranean beaches (and those of neighbouring Lebanon). The case so far is largely circumstantial. The tanker, which was carrying Iranian oil to Syria, was in the right place to have caused the spill, but it will take time to gather forensic evidence.

Yet on March 3rd Gila Gamliel, Israel’s environment minister, not only blamed the Emerald for the spill but accused Iran of causing it in a deliberate act of “environmental terrorism”. It was a dubious claim. Iran has a history of sabotaging oil tankers, not spilling oil from them. Ms Gamliel offered no evidence. Benny Gantz, the defence minister and hardly an apologist for the ayatollahs, said Israel has none.

Without proof, there is no reason to suspect the Emerald was anything but an ordinary Panama-flagged tanker, owned by an obscure holding company, running dark to ferry oil between two countries under economic sanctions—and there is nothing unusual about that.

Oil commands attention like no other commodity, for good reason. Pork bellies do not power the world; national fortunes do not rise and fall on orange-juice futures. A surge in the price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, has shaken the markets. If the politics of the business can be wild, though, the mechanics of it should be a routine matter of contracts and logistics.

In the Middle East they are often not. The Emerald is one of dozens of tankers put to unusual use since 2018, when America imposed sanctions on Iran’s oil exports. As onshore storage filled with unsold oil, some of Iran’s tankers were pressed into service as floating storage units. The waters off its main oil port turned into a maritime parking lot.

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