Tel Aviv residents 'not afraid' of threats
“If the US retaliates to our military response, we will raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground,” Expediency Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaei warned in a tweet late on Sunday.
His tweet was in reaction to Donald Trump’s Saturday tweets in which the US president threatened to target 52 Iranian cultural sites in case Iran carried out its promised revenge over the US assassination of Lt. Gen. Qasem Soleimani.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in reaction to Trump’s threats said such a move would be filed as a war crime and another breach of international law.
Major General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), were assassinated in US airstrikes in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Friday.
Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said in a statement that a harsh vengeance “in due time and right place” awaits criminals behind Soleimani’s assassination.
Tel Aviv residents 'not afraid' of threats
In Tel Aviv, Nisan Katz vowed Monday he was "not afraid" of a threat by an Iranian official to turn the Israeli city "to dust".
The warning followed a war of words between Washington and Tehran, after the US assassinated top Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani on Friday.
Katz doubted Tehran would follow through with the threat. "There shouldn't be any confrontation or war between Israel and Iran, we don't have a common border," he told AFP.
"I am not afraid of the Iranian threat, Israel is much stronger, Iran will be the main loser."
Rezai's threat against Israel, a key ally of Washington, comes after President Donald Trump said the US would hit dozens of Iranian sites if Tehran attacked American personnel or assets.
But after years of warnings from Israel's arch enemy, in Tel Aviv an attack was seen as unlikely.
"I assume they will not attack us because their business is mainly with the Americans," said Benny, who did not give his surname.
"Although they've hated us for years, they have huge troubles. We have our defence abilities," he told AFP on the seafront.
- 'A great provocation' -
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cut short a foreign visit and security chiefs held emergency talks after the killing of Soleimani.
Preparing for "a variety of scenarios" was advisable, the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv said in a report released Monday.
They include an "escalation of events up to a confrontation with the US, in which Israel could also be involved."
Orna Mizrahi, a senior research fellow at the institute, said she doubted Tel Aviv or Haifa would be the main targets of Iran's response.
"A lot of the time they are talking about (how) they are going to destroy Israel... but they are very careful not to do it," she told AFP.
No comments