Israel’s outgoing IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot issued a thinly veiled threat against a powerful commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, who has been overseeing Tehran’s efforts to deepen its military presence in Syria.
In wide-ranging interviews with two leading Israeli news channels aired on Saturday night, Eisenkot was asked about the threat posed to Israel by Iran, and specifically the role played by Qassem Soleimani, who heads the Quds Force expeditionary unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
He said Iran seeks to destroy the Jewish state and had sought to “strangle Israel from Lebanon, Syria and the Gaza Strip.” Thanks to IDF operations, including the exposure of Hezbollah’s cross-border attack tunnels from Lebanon, he said, Iran was “a long way from achieving that goal.”
Asked whether Iran was giving up, Eisenkot said no, but that it was “scaling back.”
Noting that Soleimani was coordinating Iran’s military activities across Israel’s northern border, a Hadashot TV interviewer asked Eisenkot why he was still alive: “Are you weighing, or did you weigh, hitting him?”
“He who acts against us puts himself in danger,” replied Eisenkot, noting that “I don’t want to issue threats.”
Channel 10 asked Eisenkot more bluntly of Soleimani: “Why is he still alive?”
Eisenkot: “That’s a question.”
The interviewer persisted: “If it was up to you?” Eisenkot shrugged and said nothing.
Beyond the nuclear threat posed by Iran, what worried him most was the Islamic Republic’s efforts to open a new front with Israel, by entrenching itself in Syria and strengthening its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah.
“Hezbollah has a number of capabilities,” Eisenkot told Hadashot news, “among them a sophisticated plan to conquer parts of Israel [in a future conflict]. This was the flagship project of Hezbollah. The second plan was to build up its precise weapons capabilities to hit large-scale, specific targets in Israel.”
Eisenkot said Israel in the last two years shifted its focus to Iran, its primary enemy, to prevent the IDF from getting bogged down in fighting secondary enemies like Hamas in Gaza.
No comments:
Post a Comment