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Tehran, Iran (AP) – An opinion piece published on Sunday by an extremist Iranian newspaper suggested that Iran should attack the Israeli port city of Haifa if Israel murders the scientist who founded the Republic’s military nuclear program Islamic in the early 2000s.
Although the radical Kayhan newspaper has long argued for aggressive retaliation for operations targeting Iran, Sunday’s op-ed went further, suggesting that any aggression be carried out in a way that destroys facilities and “Also causes heavy loss of life”.
Israel, suspected of having killed Iranian nuclear scientists over the past decade, has not commented on the brazen murder of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. A military-style ambush Friday in suburban Tehran reportedly saw a truck bomb explode and gunmen opened fire on the scientist, killing him and a bodyguard.
U.S. intelligence agencies and UN nuclear inspectors have said the organized military nuclear program that Fakhrizadeh oversaw was dissolved in 2003, but Israeli suspicion of Tehran’s atomic program and its involvement has never ceased.
Iranian officials blamed Israel for Friday’s attack, raising the specter of new tensions that could engulf the region, including US troops stationed in the Persian Gulf and beyond during President Donald Trump’s final weeks in office.
Kayhan published the article written by Iranian analyst Sadollah Zarei, who argued that Iran’s previous responses to alleged Israeli airstrikes that killed Revolutionary Guards in Syria did not go far enough to deter Israel. He said an attack on Haifa was also to be larger than Iran’s ballistic missile attack on US troops in Iraq following the US drone strike in Baghdad that killed a senior Iranian general in January.
Striking the Israeli city of Haifa and killing large numbers of people “will certainly lead to deterrence, as the United States and the Israeli regime and its agents are by no means prepared to take part in war and military confrontation” , Zarei wrote. .
While Kayhan is a low-circulation newspaper in Iran, its editor-in-chief Hossein Shariatmadari has been appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and has been described as his advisor in the past.
Haifa, on the Mediterranean Sea, has been threatened in the past by Iran and one of its proxies, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
Such a strike would likely lead to immediate Israeli retaliation and spark a wider conflict across the Middle East. While Iran has never directly militarily targeted an Israeli city, it has carried out attacks targeting Israeli interests abroad in the past for the murder of its scientists, as in the case of the three Iranians recently released in Thailand. in exchange for a detained Anglo-Australian academic..
Israel is also believed to have its own nuclear weapons, a stock that it neither confirms nor denies having.
Iran’s parliament on Sunday held a closed-door hearing into Fakhrizadeh’s murder. Subsequently, the speaker of parliament, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, said Iran’s enemies must regret killing him.
“The criminal enemy regrets it only with a strong reaction,” he said in a program broadcast on Iranian state radio.
A public session of lawmakers saw them chanting, “Death to America! Death to Israel! “They also began consideration of a bill that would end inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The nuclear watchdog provided an unprecedented, real-time look at Iran’s civilian nuclear program following the country’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
The deal collapsed after Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the United States in 2018. Iran’s civilian atomic program has since continued its experiments and now enriches a growing uranium stockpile of up to 4.5% of purity.
That’s still well below 90% military grade levels, though experts warn Iran now has enough low-enriched uranium to reprocess as fuel for at least two atomic bombs if it chooses to pursue them. .
State television broadcast footage of Fakhrizadeh’s coffin being airlifted to Mashhad, a sacred Shia city in eastern Iran, which is home to Imam Reza’s shrine. Iranian media said on Sunday that one of the scientist’s bodyguards also died from his injuries in Friday’s attack.
Khamenei called Fakhrizadeh “the country’s eminent and prominent nuclear and defensive scientist” and demanded the “final punishment” of those behind the murder, without giving further details.
Fakhrizadeh led Iran’s so-called AMAD program which Israel and the West believed was a military operation examining the feasibility of building a nuclear weapon. The International Atomic Energy Agency says the “structured program” ended in 2003. US intelligence agencies endorsed this assessment in a 2007 report.
Israel maintains that Iran is still determined to develop a nuclear weapon. He argues that Iran’s ballistic missile program and other research could help build a bomb if it pursues one – especially as the provisions of the 2015 nuclear deal expire. Iran has long maintained that its nuclear program is peaceful and that it does not intend to build an atomic bomb.
His assassination likely complicates the plans of President-elect Joe Biden, who has said his administration will consider entering into Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers. It also increases the risk of open conflict in the final weeks of Trump’s tenure, as any retaliation could provoke a US military response, said Amos Yadlin, former head of Israeli military intelligence who is now director of the Institute of ‘Tel Aviv University for National Security Studies.
“I strongly recommend officials to keep their mouths shut and not to leak anything. They’ve talked too much already, ”he said, referring to the Israeli prime minister’s cryptic remarks to his supporters that he couldn’t discuss everything he did last week.
“Any other evidence that will help the Iranians decide retaliation against Israel is wrong,” Yadlin said.
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Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writer Joseph Krauss in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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