February 28, 2020
The regime is growing increasingly hostile to Israel with a senior official now saying openly that the Islamic Republic is merely looking for a pretext to attack Israel directly.
Until recent months, regime officials have always been careful not to make any direct threats against Israel. The standard rhetoric for decades has been that Israel “must be wiped off the map.” But until recently, it has always avoided saying who would do the wiping off.
In the last few months, a few military officials have sounded a tougher note and made vague allusions to Iran destroying Israel itself.
In the latest iteration of that threat, Mohsen Rezai, who headed the Pasdaran decades ago and is now the secretary of the Expediency Council, said “We would raze Tel Aviv to the ground for sure. We have been looking for such a pretext,” according to a translation from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
His comment about razing Tel Aviv was aired during an interview on Lebanon’s Mayadeen TV February 8.
Rezai said, “If they do something, we can use it as a pretext to attack Israel, because Israel played a role in the martyrdom of General [Qassem] Soley-mani. It was the Israelis who reported about martyr Soleymani’s trip from Damascus to Baghdad. We were waiting for the Americans to give us a pretext to strike Tel-Aviv, just like we attacked Ayn Al-Assad.” Actually, there is no evidence that Israel had anything to do with the assassination whatsoever. It was ordered by President Trump and executed by a US drone.
Rezai said, “American hegemony in the region is in a state of disintegration and instability. By proposing the ‘Deal of the Century’ [to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict], they are looking for a firm and stable foothold on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, in order to do away with the Palestinian cause once and for all, and in order to take over Gaza and disarm Hamas.”
He added that he expects “a significant weakening of the US over the next decade. If it does not leave the region completely, it will become very weak. As soon as the Saudi people and the peoples of the Persian Gulf feel that America is not what it used to be, there will be a revolution in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and it will be followed by revolutions in the other countries in the Persian Gulf.”
He asserted that “Iran will be the standard-bearer of Amer-ica’s exit from the region.”