Friday, April 19, 2024

Iran warns it may revise its ‘nuclear doctrine,’ threatens to hit Israeli nuclear sites


Iran warns it may revise its ‘nuclear doctrine,’ threatens to hit Israeli nuclear sites


Iran could review its “nuclear doctrine” following Israeli threats to strike the country, a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander said on Thursday, as the world braces for an Israeli response to Tehran’s unprecedented April 13 drone and missile attack on it.

Tehran has always insisted its nuclear program was strictly for peaceful purposes, a claim Israel and much of the Western world dismiss.

“The threats of the Zionist regime against Iran’s nuclear facilities make it possible to revise our nuclear doctrine and deviate from our previous considerations,” Ahmad Haghtalab, the Guards commander in charge of nuclear security, was quoted as saying by the semi-official Tasnim news agency.

Haghtalab also said Iran would “definitely” reciprocate any Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities. “We know exactly where the enemy’s main nuclear sites are,” he said.

“Hands are on the trigger to fire powerful missiles for the total destruction of determined targets.”

“If the Zionist regime wants to take action against our nuclear centers and facilities, it will definitely and surely face our reaction,” the official news agency IRNA quoted Haghtalab as saying. “For the counterattack, the nuclear facilities of the (Israeli) regime will be targeted and operated upon with advanced weaponry.”

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has the last say on Tehran’s nuclear program, which the West suspects has military purposes.

In 2021, Iran’s then-intelligence minister said Western pressure could push Tehran to seek nuclear weapons, the development of which Khamenei ostensibly banned in a fatwa, or religious decree, in the early 2000s.


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