The leader of Iran-backed Hezbollah of Lebanon voiced support for Iran's right to "punish" Israel over its Monday strike on Iran's consulate in the Syrian capital, saying the response was coming.
Hassan Nasrallah called the Damascus strike on Monday a "turning point" since October 7, when Palestinian group Hamas -- another Iran-backed militia -- launched an attack on Israel, killed 1,200 mostly civilians and took 240 hostages, igniting the Middle East current conflict.
The strike killed seven members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, among them a senior commander of the Quds Force, Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi. Iran has vowed a “harsh revenge.”
"Be certain, be sure, that the Iranian response to the targeting of the consulate in Damascus is definitely coming against Israel," he said.
Israel has braced itself for the possibility of a retaliatory attack, cancelling leave for all combat units and mobilizing more troops for air defense units.
Speaking to Israeli forces at an air base on Friday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel was attacking enemies wherever it decided to do so. "It could be in Damascus and it could be in Beirut," he said. "The enemy is badly hit in all places and is therefore looking for ways to respond. We are ready with a multi-layered defense."
Up until now, Tehran has cautiously steered clear of direct confrontation with Israel while supporting attacks on Israeli and US targets by its proxy forces across the region in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.
Veteran Israeli experts suggest that Iran is unlikely to retaliate directly against Israel for the attack. Diplomats and analysts suggest that Iran's clerical elite, wary of jeopardizing its hold on power, avoids seeking an all-out conflict with Israel or the US. Instead, Tehran would prefer to keep using its proxies to carry out selective tactical attacks on its archfoes.
The precision airstrike that demolished a building in the Damascus embassy compound on April 1, prompted the chief commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Hossein Salami to announce on Friday during the anti-Israel Quds Day that no attack on “our sacred system [regime] will remain unanswered.”
“We will make them regret this crime and other similar ones with the help of God,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, said a day after the attack."
Despite Tehran's saber-rattling, Israeli experts are skeptical that Khamenei will authorize an attack, which would be directly attributable to Tehran.
Yossi Melman, a veteran Israeli columnist for the left-leaning Haaretz, told Iran International that the Iranians “will strike but not from their territory.” He said the attacks could emanate “From Iraq and or Syria and more intensively.”
The Islamic Republic has targeted Israeli diplomats for assassination and its installations via its proxies like Hezbollah across Europe over the past four decades. A telling example, Iran’s IRGC paid a Pakistani man in Germany to assassinate pro-Israel advocates, Melman noted. He also highlighted that the “Americans are warning Iran that Iran should not be involved in war.”
In a White House readout of the Thursday conversation between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the statement said “The two leaders also discussed public Iranian threats against Israel and the Israeli people. President Biden made clear that the United States strongly supports Israel in the face of those threats.”
Melman said if the Islamic Republic launched missiles at Israel from within the territory of Iran, “Israel could use Jericho missiles for the first time because they are the only missiles that can reach Iran from Israeli soil.”
Yigal Carmon, the former counter-terrorism advisor to two Israeli Prime Ministers, told Iran International "Iran is not ready nor willing to have a direct total war with Israel. Therefore even a direct Iranian attack on an Israeli embassy abroad is not probable.”
Carmon, who is the president and founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), added, “Khamenei’s policies over the years show a combination of caution and cowardice. Iran’s reactions to Israeli and American attacks in the past show a pattern of escalation when they believe the adversary is weak. And they back down when they see their adversary is strong and shows deterrence, and is ready for war.”
Carmon famously predicted the Iran-backed Hamas attack on Israel in Iran International comment on September 5. He said a major attack will unfold either in September or October. Carmon is a fluent Arabic speaker and well-versed in the inner workings of the Islamic Republic.
He added that “Iran has a mega-plan, which is the vision and legacy of the founder of the Islamic Revolution, to turn the whole region gradually, in a long-term well planned process through local proxies, into a region under its Shiite hegemony.”
The Iranian regime’s imperialist reach has extended to Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria where Khamenei has cultivated terrorist movements and militias.
Carmon, who has been a sharp of critic of Netanyahu’s government for cooperating with the Islamist regime in Qatar in sending funds to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip prior to October 7, said “Contrary to what the Israeli establishment believe, that Israel’s preventive strikes deter Iran, the truth is that no attacks such as the one in Damascus deter it, in the same way that the killing of Soleimani did not deter Iran from pursuing its plans.”
The former colonel in Israel’s military intelligence, Carmon, warned that Iran “will follow their mega-plan undismayed by Israel’s attacks and move on to their next immediate target: Jordan.”
He said Iran seeks to “topple the Jordanian Kingdom” and, as part of its grand plan to reshape the Mideast to “turn Jordan from a pro-Western country into a country ruled by pro-Iran militias like Iraq.“
He warned that if the Jordanian state collapses into Iran’s yoke, Tehran “will activate the pro-Iran militias to attack Israel from the East, as well as escalate in the north and with whatever power Hamas still has in Gaza.”
Tehran-born Ben Sabti, an expert on Iran from the Israeli National Security and Strategy Institute, told Iran International “My assessment is that Iran won't attack Israel directly, because there is not any use in it.”
He said that “anything that Iran can do, their proxies can do too, so why will Iran, which has kept itself out of the war until now, suddenly should throw itself into the conflict.”
The viral jokes posted on Persian social media after the attack included “Iran's regime destroyed the country of Israel with a few buckets of water by the IRGC" and "Thank God, the embassy employees were not in the Kotlett #2 building".
Iranians protesting against the regime have used the word Kotlett, which are Persian meat patties, to describe the body of the IRGC Quds commander Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a precision strike by the US in Iraq in 2020.
Any success of the Israeli army in eliminating the IRGC commanders and their forces in Syria is typically welcomed by hundreds of thousands of Iranians via social media posts or comments under YouTube videos.
Users also use the expression Kotlett to address other eliminated IRGC commanders. They do so despite the arrest of hundreds of people by regime forces over such posts. That includes Navvab Ebrahimi, a chef with 3.2 million instagram followers, who was detained for posting a video tutorial of how to cook Kotlett on the anniversary of Soleimani’s death.
This week, no one was arrested for using the term Kotlett on social media – apparently because of the large number of violations. But, according to the Fars News Agency, the IRGC’s mouthpiece, a person who displayed the Israeli flag was arrested. Over the past four years, the Israeli flag has been observed flying over numerous bridges in major cities before being removed by municipal workers.
For years, Iranian people have frequently refused to step on the American and Israeli flags that the agents of the Islamic Republic painted on pavements – especially at universities. Many news websites, including some hardliner outlets have stopped labeling Israel as the "Zionist regime", instead using its official name. This shift has resulted in roughly half of them using the term "Zionist regime" and the other half using Israel's official name.
After the killing of Qassem Soleimani and his companions at the Baghdad airport, both traditional religious people and reformists found themselves in a unique emotional situation. Given the wave of hatred against former US President Donald Trump promoted by the world media, these Iranian factions were willing to attend Soleimani’s funeral.
Of course, the government told many lies during that time – including the deceitful claim that Soleimani’s funeral had 7 million attendees in Tehran. At best, there were hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom were bussed into the capital by the authorities to mourn Soleimani, whom they believed saved them from ISIS.
Today, the social conditions surrounding the killing of Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who was Soleimani's military equal, are completely different from those in 2020.
During the Mahsa Jina Amini movement from 2022 to 2023, the Iranian nation lost over 500 souls through the bullets of the IRGC and special forces.
Iranian society, which turned the regime’s fraudulent 2024 elections into a disgrace for the Islamic Republic with a historically low voter turnout, is certainly not ready for a massive funeral for Zahedi and his companions. Similar to the funeral of the IRGC’s Razi Mousavi in 2023, burial ceremonies with a huge bused crowd are unlikely—particularly given the regime’s plethora of challenges it needs to militarily contend with.
In the six months following October 7, the regime has been unable to organize a demonstration of even tens of thousands dedicated to Hamas. Instead, it has utilized the few thousand participants of Friday prayers in major cities to march. The distribution of sweets by the IRGC paramilitary Basij members after the Hamas attack, also received a very cold response from the Iranian people.
With a significant portion of society displaying complete neutrality towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and an increase in “Israelophilia” – the anti-Israel rhetoric the government has historically capitalized on has reached its lowest level since 1979.
The 2021 survey conducted by the Gamaan Institute reveals that 35% of participants hold a positive opinion of Israel. Additionally, 65% expressed opposition to the slogan "Death to Israel," while 64% agreed with the slogan "Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran."
On the celebrity front, figures like Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who traveled to Israel and directed films there, have shattered numerous taboos. The visit of exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi to Israel in April 2023, welcomed by the majority of Iranians living abroad and criticized by only a few individuals (mostly Islamists and Marxists), marked another significant step in the normalization of relations between the people of Iran and Israel.
In recent years, Iranians have praised Israel for its democracy, tolerance towards Israeli Arabs and the LGBT community, water resource management, information technologies, and wealth accumulation. Many Iranians residing in Western countries also collaborate with Israeli companies.
Israeli fiction series like "Tehran" (which aired in two seasons in 2020 and 2022) have been downloaded, watched, and well-received by millions of Iranians. Despite the series featuring a security storyline where Mossad security agents defeat Iranian security agents in their activities, it has garnered significant popularity among Iranian audiences.
Some Islamists and Iranian leftists may attribute this change of attitude to enmity towards the regime or adopt the "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" approach, or even link it to the change in people’s slogans during the Green Movement.
But, they miss the main point.
Iranians have been seeking an ally for their future nation-state, given the lack of permanent friendship among their Arab neighbors or the Turks.
Today, they find themselves more aligned with the ideals and visions of the nation-state of Israel. The history of friendship between non-Jewish Iranians and Jews has played a significant role in this shift.
Salami was speaking just five days after an Israeli precision airstrike killed two top IRGC generals and five other officers, who were meeting in the Islamic Republic’s embassy in Damascus.
The funeral of the seven officers took place Friday morning as part of the Quds Day ceremonies. Salami, speaking during the even said, “Our brave men will punish the Zionist regime. As long as our bodies are carried in these coffins to be mourned by the people, no power, no matter how great, will be able to strike a blow against this nation.”
Iran’s Supreme Leader and other top officials have vowed a harsh response to Israel at a time of Tehran’s own choosing. While many doubt a direct attack against Israel, there is a high degree of concern about Iranian proxies or agents abroad conducting retaliatory operations against Israel.
Salami also claimed that Hamas has sent messages from Gaza that it can defeat Israel, telling Tehran not to be concerned.
The IRGC commander also railed against the United States for having long supported Israel, reiterating the Islamic Republic’s public stance that American power is waning and US influence in the Middle East is weakening. He claimed that support for Israel has put the United States “at the center of global hatred.”
“The Zionist regime is being kept alive by America's artificial respiration, and it is breathing in the special political, security, and mental intensive care unit of America. Whenever the West's artificial respiration apparatus is removed from the Zionist regime's nose, it will wither and collapse, and this is close, not far,” Salami insisted.
President Joe Biden on Thursday warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the overall humanitarian situation in Gaza is unacceptable, and Israel should take steps to address the crisis or face consequences. Many lawmakers and experts criticized Biden for putting pressure on Israel while its ally faces direct threats from the hostile Iranian government.
Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian took to social media on Friday to accuse the United States of being directly responsible for the continuation of the war in Gaza.
Tasnim News, affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard, quoted former IRGC commander and top regime insider, Mohsen Rezaei as saying that Tehran “has made and will definitely implement the decision about taking revenge for the Israeli strike on the Iranian diplomatic mission in Syria.”