DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – Iran's supreme leader on Saturday threatened Israel and the US with a “severe response” to attacks on Iran and its allies.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke as Iranian officials increasingly threatened to launch another strike against Israel after its attack on the Islamic Republic on October 26 that targeted military bases and other locations and killed at least five people.
Any further attacks from either side could engulf the Middle East, which is already reeling from the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip and Israel's invasion of Lebanon, into a regional conflict ahead of Tuesday's US presidential election.
“The enemies, whether it is the Zionist regime or the United States of America, will definitely get a painful response for what they are doing in Iran and the Iranian country and the opposition groups,” Khamenei said in a video released by Iranian state media.
The supreme leader did not elaborate on the timing of the threatened attack, or its scope. The US military operates from bases throughout the Middle East, and some troops now operate a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, battery in Israel.
The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier may be in the Arabian Sea, and Pentagon press secretary Maj. General Pat Ryder said on Friday that more destroyers, military groups, tanks and long-range B-52 bombers will arrive in the region to deter Iran. and its military supporters.
The 85-year-old Khamenei has sounded a note of caution in previous remarks, saying officials will consider Iran's response and that Israel's attack “should not be exaggerated or downplayed.” Iran launched two direct attacks on Israel, in April and October.
But Iran's efforts to downplay the Israeli attack have faltered as satellite images analyzed by The Associated Press showed damage to military bases near Tehran linked to the country's ballistic missile program, as well as to a Revolutionary Guard facility used for satellite launches.
Iran's supporters, called the “Axis of Resistance” by Tehran, have also been hit hard by Israel's ongoing attacks, particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Iran has long used those groups as a means of attacking Israel and as a shield against direct attacks. Some analysts believe that those groups want Iran to do more to support them militarily.
Iran, however, has been facing its own problems at home, as its economy struggles under the weight of international sanctions and it has faced years of mass protests. After Khamenei's speech, Iran's rial fell to 691,500 against the dollar, close to an all-time low. It was 32,000 rials to the dollar when Tehran reached its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
Gen. Mohammad Ali Naini, a spokesman for Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard that controls the ballistic missiles needed to target Israel, gave an interview published by the Fars news agency shortly before Khamenei's remarks were released. In it, he warned Iran's response “will be smarter, stronger and beyond the understanding of the enemy.”
“The leaders of the Zionist regime should be looking out of their bedroom windows and protecting their pirate pilots from their little space,” he warned. Israeli military pilots appear to have used air-launched ballistic missiles in the Oct. 26.
Khamenei on Saturday met with university students to celebrate Students' Day, which commemorates the incident on November 4, 1978, when the Iranian army opened fire on students protesting the shah's rule at the University of Tehran. The shooting killed and wounded several students and fueled the tensions that gripped Iran at the time that eventually led to the shah's flight from the country and the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The crowd greeted Khamenei with a roar, chanting: “The blood in our veins is a gift to our leader!” Others also made a hand gesture – similar to the “time out” sign – given by the slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2020 in a speech in which he threatened that American troops arriving in the Mideast would rise and “return with horizontal boxes”.
Iran will mark the 45th anniversary of the tragic kidnapping of the American Ambassador this Sunday, according to the Persian calendar. The attack on Nov. 4, 1979, at the embassy of Islamist students led to a 444-day crisis, which intensified the decades-long hostility between Tehran and Washington that continues to this day.
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