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Iranian General threatens to wipe Israel off the map
A senior member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) threatened yesterday to wipe Israel off the “global political map”.
Brigadier-General Hossein Salami told Iranian state television that: “Our strategy is to erase Israel from the global political map. And it seems that, considering the evil that Israel is doing, it is bringing itself closer to that.” He added: “We announce that if Israel does anything to start a new war, it will obviously be the war that will end with its elimination, and the occupied territories will be returned. The Israelis will not have even a cemetery in Palestine to bury their own corpses.”
Salami’s comments followed comment by Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, who said in a Lebanese TV interview that the “axis of resistance” of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah could respond to Israel’s Syria strikes with their own attack on Tel Aviv.
Last week Israel carried out rare daylight air strikes on IRGC targets in Damascus, which followed the launching of a surface-to-surface missile by the IRGC’s Quds Force toward the Golan Heights.
A spokesman for the IRGC on Monday denied reports that 12 soldiers were killed in the air strike. “If the IRGC had had 12 casualties, there should have been funerals in Iran for them over the past 20 days,” said spokesman Brig.-Gen. Ramazan Sharif, according to the Mehr news agency.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Kan 11 News on Sunday that Iran’s policy in Syria is a threat to Israel and that Germany is working to ensure Iranian forces don’t get “too close to the Golan Heights”. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said on Monday that the EU was close to setting up an alternative channel to allow its firms to do business with Tehran. “This has always been our goal and we will implement it,” Maas said, according a report in the Washington Post. A US official told AP on Friday the US will fully enforce its sanctions and hold individuals and entities accountable for undermining them. Senator Tom Cotton, R-Ark., also told the AP: “The choice is whether to do business with Iran or the United States,” adding, “I hope our European allies choose wisely.”