by Oleg Burunov
Referring to Tehran’s previous pledge to obliterate Israel, the Jewish state’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned earlier this year that Iran is within range of Israeli warplanes.
Mojtaba Zannour, chairman of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, has reiterated his threat that Israel “will not live for longer than twenty or thirty minutes” if Tel Aviv or Washington “makes a mistake”.
“We have employed a strategy of asymmetric warfare. What does this mean? It means making our enemy’s strengths ineffective or less effective – taking advantage or their weaknesses. We have focused and worked on these things. The [Iranian] regime has created deterrence,” Zannour told Iran’s Channel 5 news outlet.
Earlier this year, he told the Tehran-based Arabic language news TV network al-Alam that if the US attacks Iran, “only half an hour will remain of Israel’s lifespan”.
In the Channel 5 interview, he referred to “36 American military bases in the [Middle East] region”, saying that Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are “online and are tracking every change in the forces at the US bases in the area.
“If they shoot, they will be hit. When the [Supreme Iranian] Leader [Ayatollah Ali Kamenei] says that the days of hit-and-run are over, he is not speaking out of emotion or excitement. His words are backed up by what has already been done,” Zannour underscored.
This comes amid frozen relations between Israel and Iran, with the Jewish state repeatedly accusing Iran of establishing a permanent military presence in Syria.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have been conducting airstrikes against what they have claimed were Iranian military targets in Syria, while Tehran argues that it has only been sending military advisers to Damascus to help it fight terrorism.
Iran, which denies Israel’s right to exist, has also ramped up its stern rhetoric against Israel, promising to wipe it off the political map.
As for the US-Iranian tensions which have been simmering since Washington’s withdrawal from the JCPOA last year, they escalated in June following an apparent sabotage attack against two oil tankers off Iran’s coast in the Gulf of Oman.
Washington immediately blamed Tehran for the attacks, while the Iranian Foreign Ministry accused the Trump administration and its Israeli and Gulf State allies of deliberately escalating the situation to “cover up” the US’ “economic terrorism against Iran”.
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