An advisor to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says Israeli diplomatic missions around the world could become targets of retaliatory attacks in response to the bombing of the Iranian embassy in Syria blamed on Israel.
“The [anti-Israeli] resistance front is ready for all possible retaliation scenarios and no Israeli embassy worldwide is safe from it,” General Yahya Rahim Safavi, a former commander of Iran’s elite army forces, said on Sunday, according to state broadcaster Al-Alam.
Two generals and five officers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) were killed last Monday in an airstrike on the Iranian embassy compound in the Syrian capital Damascus.
Iran’s leadership promptly blamed its arch-enemy Israel for the attack and threatened to retaliate. Israel’s military has not claimed responsibility for the strike, but says the compound was not a civilian embassy.
Safavi, a senior aide and advisor to Khamenei, was commander of the IRGC from 1997 to 2007. Despite having little political sway in the country, conservative media in Iran regularly quote his anti-Israeli remarks.
Analysts in Iran consider an Iranian attack on Israeli embassies to be unlikely. The government of President Ebrahim Raisi has also distanced itself from such a threat.
However, an Iranian attack on Israeli or US positions and facilities via pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon, Yemen or Iraq is seen as a distinct possibility.