The deployment underlined Israel's growing interest in the Red Sea region, a key shipping route, amid a sharp increase in Iranian support for Hamas in the Gaza Strip, including arms shipments through the Red Sea.

Israeli officials said there were no plans for a permanent submarine deployment in the Red Sea/Horn of Africa region, which is becoming increasingly turbulent.

But in recent months Iranian warships have deployed in the Gulf of Aden, ostensibly to work with an international flotilla combating piracy off Somalia. This deployment has aroused some concern in Israel, given Tehran's recent efforts to establish naval bases in that region.

Possibly the most important aspect of the Israeli deployment, since the warships have to transit Egypt's Suez Canal from their normal deployment zone in the Mediterranean into the Red Sea, is what some observers see as the emergence of an informal alliance between Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia against the Islamic republic.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the Sunni-dominated Arab states, particularly in the Gulf, fear that the spread of power and influence by overwhelmingly Shiite Iran could engulf them. This is an existential threat that Israel also fears.

According to well-informed regional sources, the intelligence services of all three countries, along with those of Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, have met at various times, and not always with Israeli participation, to discuss the threat all perceive from a nuclear-armed and expansionist Iran.

These gatherings, usually secret, have sometimes included senior officials of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department.

There has been no indication that these intelligence meetings produced any formalized joint military planning.

But the Israeli warships' use of the Suez Canal in June and July indicates that Egypt and Israel have come to some arrangement for the speedy deployment of Israeli warships from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, from where they can access the Arabia Sea and move within cruise-missile range of Iran.

Permission to do so would have to come from the highest level in the Cairo government.

The Israeli submarine Leviathan, one of the Israeli navy's three German-built Dolphin-class boats, transited the canal into the Red Sea in June escorted by the Saar 5-class corvette Hanit for maneuvers off Eilat, Israel's only port in the Red Sea. The nuclear-capable Leviathan returned to its base at Haifa on the Mediterranean on July 5.

Israel has two more Dolphins on order and once they are delivered sometime in 2014, Israel would be able to keep at least one of these boats in the vicinity of Iran at all times.

The Hanit, along with another Saar-5 vessel, the Eilat, passed through the canal heading south on Tuesday. The Hanit was badly damaged in July 2006 when it was hit off the coast of Lebanon by a Chinese-designed C-802 anti-ship missile fired by Hezbollah during a 34-day war.

An Egyptian official was quoted as saying the corvette deployment was to "stop arms smuggling to Gaza."

That is a plausible explanation. In January and February Israeli aircraft were reported to have attacked truck convoys carrying Iranian weapons for Hamas across Sudan, which lies on the Red Sea's western shore.

However, Egypt's acquiescence in allowing the Israelis to use the canal -- allowing their warships to reach the southern Red Sea in days rather than the weeks normally needed to sail around Africa -- indicates that Cairo would probably have no objection to facilitating an Israeli deployment if a decision was taken to strike Iran.

Going through the canal also is the only way for Israeli ships to get to the Arabian Sea without refueling, a vital consideration if hostilities broke out.

"Egypt and Israel wanted to show their coordination in the face of Iran pursuing its nuclear program," Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot commented on July 14.

There were reports earlier this month that Saudi Arabia would allow Israeli warplanes to use its air space in an attack on Iran. That was widely denied, but Egypt's agreement on the Israeli naval deployments suggests the possibility of wider Arab participation.

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