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An opinion piece published by a hardline Iranian newspaper suggested that Iran should attack the Israeli port city of Haifa if Israel carries out the assassination of a scientist linked to its dissolved military nuclear program.
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 killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh on Friday.
Iranian officials have blamed Israel for the attack, raising the specter of new tensions that could engulf the region, including US troops stationed in the Persian Gulf and beyond.
Kayhan published the article written by Iranian analyst Sadollah Zarei, who argued that Iran’s previous reactions to the alleged Israeli airstrikes that killed the Revolutionary Guard forces in Syria did not go far enough to deter Israel.
Beating Haifa and killing large numbers of people “will definitely lead to deterrence, because the United States, the Israeli regime and their agents are in no way ready to engage in a war and a military confrontation,” Zarei wrote. He said an assault on Haifa had to be larger than Iran’s ballistic missile attack on US troops in Iraq following the US drone strike that killed a senior Iranian general in January.
Haifa, in the Mediterranean Sea, has been threatened in the past by both Iran and one of its proxies, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah recently suggested targeting Haifa’s reserves of ammonium nitrate, a highly explosive fertilizer that fueled the deadly Beirut port explosion in August that killed 193 people and injured 6,500 others.
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.
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.
State television broadcast images of Fakhrizadeh’s coffin being transferred to Mashhad, a Shiite holy city in eastern Iran, home to Imam Reza’s shrine.
Analysts have compared Fakhrizadeh to that of Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led America’s Manhattan Project during World War II who created the atomic bomb.
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. Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program is peaceful.
His assassination likely complicates the plans of US 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 the remaining weeks in office by President Donald Trump, who unilaterally withdrew the US from the atomic deal in 2018, starting a series of escalating incidents between Tehran and Washington.
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