An opinion piece published Sunday by a hardline Iranian newspaper suggested that Iran should attack the Israeli port city of Haifa if Israel carries out the assassination of the scientist who founded the Islamic Republic’s military nuclear program in the early 1990s. 2000.
Although the hardline newspaper Kayhan has long advocated aggressive retaliation for operations against Iran, Sunday’s op-ed went further, suggesting that any assault be carried out in a way that destroys the facilities and “also cause many human casualties. “
Israel, suspected of killing Iranian nuclear scientists over the past decade, has not commented on the blatant assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. A military-style ambush on Friday outside Tehran reportedly saw a truck bomb explode and gunmen opened fire on the scientist, killing him and a bodyguard.
US intelligence agencies and UN nuclear inspectors have said that the organized military nuclear program that Fakhrizadeh oversaw was disbanded in 2003, but Israeli suspicion of Tehran’s atomic program and its involvement has never stopped.
Iranian officials have blamed Israel for Friday’s attack, raising the specter of new tensions that could engulf the region, including US troops stationed in the Persian Gulf and beyond during the remaining weeks in President Donald’s office. Trump.
Kayhan published the article written by Iranian analyst Sadollah Zarei, who argued that Iran’s previous responses to alleged Israeli airstrikes that killed the Revolutionary Guard forces in Syria did not go far enough to deter Israel. He said an assault on Haifa also had to be larger than Iran’s ballistic missile attack on US troops in Iraq following the US drone strike in Baghdad that killed a senior Iranian general in January.
Hitting the Israeli city of Haifa and killing large numbers of people “will definitely lead to deterrence, because the United States and the Israeli regime and its agents are in no way ready to engage in a war and a military confrontation,” Zarei wrote. . .
While Kayhan is a small circulation newspaper in Iran, its editor-in-chief, Hossein Shariatmadari, was appointed by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and has been described as an adviser to him in the past.
Haifa, in the Mediterranean Sea, has been threatened in the past by both Iran and one of its proxies, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
Such an attack would likely provoke immediate Israeli retaliation and spark a broader conflict throughout the Middle East. While Iran has never directly attacked an Israeli city militarily, it has carried out attacks against Israeli interests abroad in the past for the murder of its scientists, as in the case of the three Iranians recently freed in Thailand in exchange for a British academic. -Australian arrested. .
Israel is also widely believed to have its own nuclear weapons, an arsenal that it neither confirms nor denies possessing.
Iran’s parliament held a closed-door hearing on Fakhrizadeh’s assassination on Sunday. Subsequently, the speaker of parliament, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, said that Iran’s enemies must be made to regret killing him.
“The criminal enemy has no regrets except with a strong reaction,” he said in a broadcast on Iranian state radio.
A public session of legislators saw them chant: “Death to America! Death to Israel! “They also began reviewing a bill that would halt inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The nuclear watchdog has provided an unprecedented real-time look at Iran’s civilian nuclear program after the deal. 2015 nuclear power of the country with world powers.
The deal has fallen apart after Trump’s 2018 unilateral withdrawal from the United States from the deal. Since then, Iran’s civil atomic program has continued its experiments and is now enriching a growing reserve of uranium to 4.5% purity.
That’s still well below the 90% weapons grade levels, though experts warn that Iran now has enough low-enriched uranium to reprocess into fuel for at least two atomic bombs if it chooses to pursue them.
State television broadcast images of Fakhrizadeh’s coffin being transferred to Mashhad, a Shiite holy city in eastern Iran, home to the Imam Reza shrine. Iranian media said on Sunday that one of the scientist’s bodyguards had also died from injuries he sustained in Friday’s attack.
Khamenei has called Fakhrizadeh “the country’s prominent and distinguished nuclear and defense scientist” and demanded the “ultimate punishment” of those behind the killing, without elaborating.
Fakhrizadeh spearheaded Iran’s so-called AMAD program, which Israel and the West have alleged was a military operation seeking the viability of building a nuclear weapon. The International Atomic Energy Agency says the “structured program” ended in 2003. US intelligence agencies agreed with that assessment in a 2007 report.
Israel maintains that Iran still intends to develop a nuclear weapon. He argues that Iran’s ballistic missile program and other research could help build a bomb if it pursued one, especially when provisions of the 2015 nuclear deal expire. Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program is peaceful and that it has no plans. to build an atomic bomb.
His assassination likely complicates the plans of President-elect Joe Biden, who has said his administration will consider re-entering Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers. It also increases the risk of open conflict in Trump’s final weeks in office, as any retaliation could spark a US military response, said Amos Yadlin, a former Israeli military intelligence chief who now serves as director of the University Institute. from Tel Aviv for National Security Studies.
“I strongly advise officials to keep their mouths shut and not spill anything. They’ve already talked too much, ”he said, referring to Israel’s prime minister’s cryptic comments to his supporters that he couldn’t discuss everything he did last week.
“Any other evidence that helps the Iranians decide on retaliation against Israel is a mistake,” Yadlin said.
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