Israel’s Foreign Ministry’s Persian account won a Twitter contest sponsored by a satirical Iranian account, Calcalist reported Wednesday.

The Iranian account, @tanasoli, which has 115,000 followers, sponsored a contest looking for followers to nominate “the most absurd or foolish” statements made by the regime over the past 40 years.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s @IsraelPersian account offered Iranian Supreme Leaders Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s 2015 prediction that “Israel would not exist in 25 years,” accompanied by a smiley emoji.

The Israeli entry earned 1,400 likes and 100 retweets.

A few days later, @tanasoli reported that @IsraelPersian had won the contest and said that “I will report this race every year to see if this account can win another 25 years.”

A recent study conducted by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change found that in the speeches given by Khamenei since becoming Supreme Leader in 1989, he engaged in anti-Israel rhetoric 90% of the time.

The study also noted that opposition to Israel’s existence “is not restricted to individuals in Iran the West commonly identifies as regime hardliners.”

This is true of current Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, often identified as a moderate. The study noted that “50 per cent of Rouhani’s speeches are negative towards Israel, which he too refers to as the ‘Zionist regime.'”

There is some uncertainty with Khamenei’s prediction concerning the time of Israel’s destruction.

In Tehran, the regime displayed a “clock” in 2017 with a countdown towards Israel’s destruction in about 23 years. The timeline is close to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s prediction in 2015, cited by Israel’s foreign ministry, that Israel will not exist in 25 years. He also made a similar prediction in 2016.

However, an Iranian general threatened in 2016 that Iran is creating a Shiite army that will destroy Israel in 23 years.

In February 2018, a military adviser to Khamenei said that the West uses lizards to spy on Iran’s nuclear program.

[Photo: AP Archive / YouTube ]