Iran and Hezbollah vow ‘punishment and revenge’ for strike that killed IRGC generals

Iran and Hezbollah vow ‘punishment and revenge’ for strike that killed IRGC generals

AGENCIES and TOI STAFF

Iran and Hezbollah vowed Tuesday to respond to a strike widely attributed to Israel that demolished Tehran’s consulate in Damascus and killed seven people, including two generals from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a US-designated terrorist organization.

Iran’s state TV reported Tuesday that the country’s Supreme National Security Council, a key decision-making body, met late Monday and decided on a “required” response to the strike. The report said the meeting was chaired by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, but provided no further details.

In an online statement, Raisi blamed Israel for the attack, saying the “cowardly crime will not go unanswered.”

“After repeated defeats and failures against the faith and will of the Resistance Front fighters, the Zionist regime has put blind assassinations on its agenda in the struggle to save itself,” his statement added.

“The evil Zionist regime will be punished at the hands of our brave men. We will make them regret this crime and the other ones,” Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a message published on his official website.

It was not clear if Iran would respond itself, risking a dangerous confrontation with Israel and its ally the United States, or if it would continue to rely on proxies, including the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terror group and Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

While Israel does not, as a rule, comment on specific strikes in Syria, it has admitted to conducting hundreds of sorties against Iran-backed terror groups attempting to gain a foothold in the country over the last decade. The Israel Defense Forces says it attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for those groups, chief among them Hezbollah. Additionally, airstrikes attributed to Israel have repeatedly targeted Syrian air defense systems.

Faced with ongoing attacks by the Iran-backed Hezbollah and Shiite militias throughout the Middle East in the wake of Hamas’s brutal October 7 massacre, which sparked the war in Gaza, Israel has escalated its strikes on Iran-linked terror targets in Syria, killing numerous IRGC operatives, as well as members of Hezbollah and other Iranian proxy groups.

Israel has grown increasingly impatient with the daily exchanges of fire with Hezbollah, which have escalated in recent days, and warned of the possibility of a full-fledged war. Houthi rebels have also been launching long-range missiles toward Israel, including on Monday.