A senior spokesperson for Iran’s military has warned the US, UK, France and Germany to stop supporting Israel, and said that there will be an even stronger response from Iran if Israel retaliates to the strikes at the weekend.
The official state news agency IRNA reports that Brig Gen Abolfazl Shekarchi said:
We remind the heads of state of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany to stop supporting the declining child-killing terrorist regime of Israel. The Islamic Republic of Iran has proven that it is not a warmonger and does not seek to spread the war. The response will be stronger if the regime carries out more severe aggressive act.
Overnight a senior official briefed Al Jazeera that Iran had a broad range of options to use against Israel, and said that “its bullying and madly taken behavior towards Iran will not work.”
A diplomatic read-out of a call between Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi and Qatar’s emir said that the Iranian leader had said “We now categorically declare that the smallest action against Iranian interests will certainly be met with a severe, widespread and painful response against all its perpetrators.”
Al Jazeera also reports that on state TV in Iran, deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri Kani said that his country would not wait 12 days to respond to another Israeli attack, but would retaliate in “a matter of seconds.”
Iran launched over 300 strikes against Israel at the weekend in response, it said, to the destruction of its consulate in Damascus on 1 April, which it blames on Israel. The vast majority of the launches failed to reach their targets or were taken down by Israel’s air defence, aided by a coalition of partners including the UK and France.
