Abstract: The maneuvering motion of a shipborne High Frequency Surface Wave Radar (HFSWR) platform broadens the target echo signals, resulting in a reduced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the occurrence of weak targets, which in turn degrades target detection and direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation accuracy. To address the DOA estimation problem for broadened weak targets caused by the maneuvering motion of shipborne platforms, this paper proposes a DOA estimation method for broadened weak targets based on iterative motion compensation. The proposed method employs an iterative approximation strategy that integrates the compensation and DOA estimation of target echo signals, thereby overcoming the limitation of conventional methods, which require prior knowledge of the target azimuth for optimal compensation. Furthermore, a fourth-order cumulant is introduced to reconstruct the array steering vector, and the Deterministic Maximum Likelihood (DML) method is adopted for DOA estimation of the compensated target signals. This approach not only enhances the sensitivity of the DML method to targets with low SNR but also accelerates the iteration convergence rate via the incorporation of the DML algorithm. The proposed method is validated with both simulated and measured data. The results demonstrate that, under identical SNR and target broadening conditions, the root mean square error (RMSE) of the proposed method is reduced by 4.75° compared to the direct application of the DML algorithm combined with fourth-order cumulant for DOA estimation, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving the DOA estimation performance for broadened weak targets.