At a celebration of the 40th anniversary of his nation’s Islamic revolution, a general in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), threatened the Israeli cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa with destruction, CBS News reported Monday.
In an interview with the state-run IRNA news agency, Gen. Yadollah Javani, the deputy head of the IRGC said, “the United States does not have the courage to shoot a single bullet at us despite all its defensive and military assets. But if they attack us, we will raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground.”
Iranian threats to destroy two of Israel’s largest cities are not new to Iran’s leadership.
In the space of a week, last year, two senior Iranian officials were quoted threatening the same two cities.
In April of last year, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said that Hezbollah, the terrorist organization that exercises complete political and military control over Lebanon, had a rocket arsenal that will “turn Haifa and Tel Aviv into ghost-towns.”
A few days later, Ali Shirazi, the liaison between Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the IRGC, said: “Iran has the capability to destroy Israel and given the excuse, Tel Aviv and Haifa will be razed to the ground.”
Threats to destroy Israel by Iranian leadership are not uncommon.
In Tehran, the regime displayed a “clock” in 2017 with a countdown towards Israel’s destruction in about 23 years. The timeline is similar to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s prediction in 2015 that Israel will not exist in 25 years. He made a similar prediction in 2016.
Last year, Iran hosted an Hourglass Festival in anticipation of Israel’s destruction within 25 years.
Hostility to, if not the destruction of, Israel is one of the pillars of the Islamic Republic’s ideology since it was established 40 years ago, according to a paper published Monday by the Tony Blair Institute.
“From hardliners to those perceived by the West to be moderates, Iranian leaders are fiercely opposed to Israel,” wrote researcher, Kasra Aarabi. In a survey of speeches given by seven of the regime’s leaders since 1979, “Israel was the most-mentioned foreign country across the sample.”
Moreover, Aarabi’s research showed that “references to Israel as ‘a cancerous tumour that must be eradicated’ feature prominently in Khamenei’s speeches but also appear in those of moderate figures such as [current Iranian President Hassan] Rouhani.”
[Photo: sayyed shahab-o- din vajedi / WikiCommons ]