LAST UPDATE | 2 Nov
IRAN’S SUPREME LEADER has threatened Israel and the US with “a crushing response” over attacks on the country and its allies.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke as Iranian officials increasingly threatened to launch yet another strike against Israel after its 26 October on the Islamic Republic that targeted military bases and other locations, killing at least five people.
Any further attacks from either side could engulf the wider Middle East – already teetering over the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza and Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon – into a wider regional conflict just ahead of the US presidential election this Tuesday.
In a video released by Iranian state media, Khamenei said: “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.”
He did not elaborate on the timing of the attack, nor the scope.
The 85-year-old had struck a more cautious approach in earlier remarks, saying officials would weigh Iran’s response and that Israel’s attack “should not be exaggerated nor downplayed”.
Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian previously said Iran did not seek war with Israel but was ready to deliver “an appropriate response” to the strikes on Iranian military sites.
Iran’s allies, called the Axis of Resistance by Tehran, have also been severely hurt by ongoing Israeli attacks, particularly Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza.
The two groups have long been used by Iran as both an asymmetrical way to attack Israel and as a shield against a direct assault. Some analysts believe those groups want Iran to do more to back them militarily.
Analysts say Israel inflicted severe damage on Iranian air defences and missile capacities and could yet launch more wide-scale action against the Islamic republic.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who have repeatedly attacked commercial shipping in the Red Sea, are transforming themselves into a “powerful military organisation” due to “unprecedented” military support from outside sources, particularly Iran and Hezbollah, said a newly published UN report.
Ahead of the US election on Tuesday, officials in the United States have been pushing for a resolution of the Lebanon war.
On Friday, the Pentagon announced deployment of ballistic missile defence destroyers, long-range B-52 bombers and other resources to the Middle East, serving as a warning to Iran.
The capabilities would begin arriving “in coming months”, a Pentagon spokesman said.
US naval forces and heavy B-2 bombers have struck Huthi rebel targets in Yemen in response to the attacks by the rebels, who say they act in support of Palestinians.
Since 6 October, Israeli forces have carried out a major air and ground assault on north Gaza, centred on the Jabalia area, vowing to stop attempts by Hamas militants from regrouping.
“The situation unfolding in north Gaza is apocalyptic,” said a joint statement by UN agency heads.
“The area has been under siege for almost a month, denied basic aid and life-saving supplies while bombardment and other attacks continue,” they said.
“The entire Palestinian population in north Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence.”
In the Gaza City area, medics administered polio vaccines to children. The World Health Organisation had said the necessary second round would begin in the territory’s north on Saturday, after Israeli bombing halted the drive.
Witnesses said Israeli warplanes twice hit Beit Lahia, adjacent to Jabalia, overnight.
Today, Israel’s military claimed said dozens of militants were killed around Jabalia “in aerial and ground activity”.
Troops were also operating in central Gaza and Rafah in the territory’s far south, it added.
Medics and Gaza’s civil defence rescuers today reported three people killed in a strike on Nuseirat, in central Gaza, a day after several people were killed in an Israeli strike.
After nearly a year of exchanges over Israel’s northern border, which Hezbollah said were in support of Hamas, Israel on 23 September escalated its bombing campaign against targets in Lebanon and later sent in ground troops.
Hezbollah has since fired more deeply into Israel.
A strike in Israel’s Sharon area north of Tel Aviv wounded 19 people, four of them moderately, police said today, after the army reported three projectiles fired from Lebanon into central Israel.
Israel’s military says 37 soldiers have been killed in Lebanon since it began ground operations, and Israeli figures show at least 63 people have been killed on the Israeli side of the border over the past year.
Hezbollah said it had again launched rockets at Israel’s Glilot intelligence base near Tel Aviv, and also claimed rocket fire against “military industries” in the Haifa area.
AFP images from Tira, a town northeast of Tel Aviv, showed the upper wall blown out in what appeared to be a residential building.
Several cars below were crushed.
Since the war escalated, Israeli strikes have killed at least 1,911 people in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally of health ministry figures.
Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed 43,314 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures from the Palestinian health ministry which the UN considers reliable.
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