Iran and Hezbollah vowed to respond to a strike widely attributed to Israel that demolished Tehran’s consulate in Damascus and killed seven people, including two generals from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Iran’s state TV reported that the country’s Supreme National Security Council decided on a “required” response to the strike. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi chaired meeting of the council on Tuesday.
In a statement, President Raisi blamed Israel for the attack, saying the “cowardly crime will not go unanswered.”
“After repeated defeats and failures against the faith and will of the Resistance Front fighters, the Zionist regime has put blind assassinations on its agenda in the struggle to save itself,” his statement added.
“The evil Zionist regime will be punished at the hands of our brave men. We will make them regret this crime and the other ones,” Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a message published on his official website.
It was not clear if Iran would respond itself, risking a dangerous confrontation with Israel and its ally the United States, or if it would continue to rely on proxies, including the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terror group and Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
While Israel does not, as a rule, comment on specific strikes in Syria, it has admitted to conducting hundreds of sorties against Iran-backed terror groups attempting to gain a foothold in the country over the last decade.
The Israel Defense Forces said it attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for those groups, chief among them Hezbollah.
Additionally, airstrikes attributed to Israel have repeatedly targeted Syrian air defense system.
The airstrike in Syria killed Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who led the Quds force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Lebanon and Syria until 2016. It also killed Zahedi’s deputy, Gen. Mohammad Hadi Hajriahimi, and five other officers.
I am an experienced writer, analyst, and author. My exposure in English journalism spans more than 28 years. In the past, I have been working with daily The Muslim (Lahore Bureau), daily Business Recorder (Lahore/Islamabad Bureaus), Daily Times, Islamabad, daily The Nation (Lahore and Karachi). With daily The Nation, I have served as Resident Editor, Karachi. Since 2009, I have been working as a Freelance Writer/Editor for American organizations.
