Iranian aid ships head for Gaza

One ship left port on Sunday and another will depart by Friday, loaded with food, construction material and toys, the report said. The boats would be part of international efforts to break Israel's isolation of the Gaza Strip.

"Until the end of the Gaza blockade, Iran will continue to ship aid," said an official at Iran's Society for the Defence of the Palestinian Nation.

While Israel has long suspected Iran, which rejects the Jewish state's right to exist, of supplying weapons to Hamas, Tehran says it only provides moral support to the group.

(...) An official of the Iranian Red Crescent Society's youth organisation said some 100,000 Iranians had volunteered as potential crew for aid ships, Iran daily reported.

A senior Iranian official said earlier Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards were ready to provide a military escort to aid ships heading to Gaza if Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei so commands.

But the Guards' deputy head, Hossein Salami, said there were no plans to do so. "Such a thing is not on our agenda," he was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency on Monday.