The former Commander-in-Chief of IRGC and Secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council, Major General Rezaie threatened that the Israeli regime would receive a crushing reaction and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will not even find the time to escape if Israeli try invading Iran, Mehr News reports.
“About Netanyahu’s unwise words, I should say that if they carry out the slightest unwise move against Iran, we will level Tel Aviv to the ground,” said Rezaei on Monday, adding Tehran “will not give Netanyahu any opportunity to flee.”
The former commander-in-chief of IRGC made the remarks after the recent claims of Benjamin Netanyahu at Munich Security Conference where Netanyahu showed a piece of iron debris claiming that it belonged to an Iranian drone. Netanyahu said on Sunday that Israel could act against Iran itself, not just its allies in the Middle East. Saying that today the enemies of Iran are targeting three important covenants of the Islamic Republic of Iran, according to Rezaie leadership, IRGC, and clerics, he urged the clerics and the IRGC to unite and interact to foil enemies’ plots.
“The enemies are after framing the Islamic Establishment as incompetent to stimulate the masses of people against the state, but as the Leader said the masses are supportive of the Establishment,” reiterated Major General Rezaie.
Touching upon the recent events following the Munich Security Conference where Netanyahu showed a piece of iron debris claiming that it belonged to an Iranian drone.
“Fortunately today we are confronting with two opponents who are both grappling with domestic troubles; one of them with an economic corruption dossier and the other with election campaign offenses,” said Rezaie referring to U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli PM Netanyahu.
He was responding to the latest anti-Iran comments by the Israeli prime minister at the Munich Security Conference, during which Netanyahu displayed a wreckage of what he alleged to be an Iranian drone and said that if pushed, Israel would act “not only against Iranian proxies that are attacking us but against Iran itself.”
Netanyahu singled out Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in his speech at the security conference, as he lifted up a piece of the drone’s wreckage.
“Mr. Zarif, do you recognize this? You should, it’s yours. You can take back with you a message to the tyrants of Tehran — do not test Israel’s resolve!” proclaimed Netanyahu to the audience, which included Zarif.
Dismissing Netanyahu’s address as a “theatrical move and a childish game,” Rezaei claimed that “U.S. and Israeli leaders don’t know Iran and don’t understand the power of resistance, and therefore they continuously face defeat.
“Today, the situation of the U.S. and Israel indicates their fear of the Zionist regime’s collapse and of the U.S.’s decline,” he added.
In comments last week, lieutenant commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps warned the Israeli regime of a hell that Iran could create for Zionists, recommending Israel to abandon the dream of conquering lands from “the river to the sea”, a term Israel uses to refer to territories from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.
A few hours after Netanyahu’s speech on Sunday, Zarif dismissed the Israeli leader’s warning as a “cartoonish circus which does not even deserve the dignity of a response.” The Iranian foreign minister accused Netanyahu of deliberately escalating the situation with “almost daily incursions into Syrian airspace” at a time when he was under pressure at home.
“You were the audience for a cartoonish circus just this morning which does not even deserve the dignity of a response,” Zarif said, as he took the stage shortly after Netanyahu’s fiery speech.
Zarif, in his speech, repeatedly called Netanyahu “obsessive” in his focus on the Iranian regime as a threat to Israel’s security, and branded his assertion that Tehran would “do nothing” if the U.S. pulled out of the landmark 2015 nuclear deal as “delusional.”
“I can assure that if Iran’s interests are not secured, Iran will respond, will respond seriously and I believe it would be a response that means people would be sorry for taking the erroneous action they did,” said Zarif of the nuclear deal, adding that “we will not be the first ones to violate” the agreement.
On Monday, a senior IDF general warned that the chances of war were higher than ever for 2018 in light of the battlefield victories in the Syrian civil war by Assad and his allies Iran and Hezbollah.
“The year 2018 has the potential for escalation [of military conflict], not necessarily because either side wants to initiate it, but because of a gradual deterioration. This has led us to raise the level of preparedness,” Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, head of IDF Operations, told Army Radio in a rare interview.