Iran’s supreme leader on Saturday threatened Israel and the U.S. with “a crushing response” over attacks on Iran and its allies.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke as Iranian officials are increasingly threatening to launch yet another strike against Israel after its Oct. 26 attack on the Islamic Republic that targeted military bases and other locations and killed at least five people.
Any further attacks from either side could engulf the wider Middle East, already teetering over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip and Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon, into a wider regional conflict just ahead of the U.S. presidential election this Tuesday.
“The enemies, whether the Zionist regime or the United States of America, will definitely receive a crushing response to what they are doing to Iran and the Iranian nation and to the resistance front,” Khamenei said in video released by Iranian state media.
The supreme leader did not elaborate on the timing of the threatened attack, nor the scope. The U.S. military operates on bases throughout the Middle East, with some troops now manning a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, battery in Israel.
The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier likely is in the Arabian Sea, while Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said Friday that more destroyers, fighter squadrons, tankers and B-52 long-range bombers would be coming to the region to deter Iran and its militant allies.
Gen. Mohammad Ali Naini, a spokesman for Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard which controls the ballistic missiles needed to target Israel, gave an interview published by the semiofficial Fars news agency just before Khamenei’s remarks were released. In it, he warned Iran’s response “will be wise, powerful and beyond the enemy’s comprehension.”
“The leaders of the Zionist regime should look out from the windows of their bedrooms and protect their criminal pilots within their small territory,” he warned. Israeli air force pilots appear to have used air-launched ballistic missiles in the Oct. 26 attack.
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