Foreign Minister Israel Katz on Wednesday threatened that if Iran launches an attacks from its own soil then Israel will strike back inside Iran, amid increasingly belligerent rhetoric between the two countries,
The Times of Israel reports.
Katz’s warning came after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Israel “must be punished and it shall be” for allegedly attacking an Iranian consular building in Syria’s Damascus, killing two generals among several Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers.
Khamenei said that in bombing an embassy site, Israel “attacked our territory.”
“If Iran attacks from its territory, Israel will react and attack in Iran ” Katz posted in Hebrew to his official account on social media platform X.
He then repeated the same warning in a Persian-language post and tagged Khamenei’s official X account.
Iran, which says it seeks to destroy the Jewish state, has developed rockets with a range that can hit anywhere in Israel and has boasted of its ability to strike.
In a major escalation of Israel’s war with regional adversaries, suspected Israeli warplanes bombed a building in the Syrian capital on April 1 in a strike that Iran said killed seven IRGC military advisers at a consulate site, one of whom was Iran’s top commander in Syria, Mohammad Reza Zahedi.
Khamenei said the strike, which leveled a five-story building adjacent to the Iranian embassy in Syria, had run roughshod over international agreements providing for the inviolability of diplomatic premises.
“The consulate and embassy offices in any country are the territory of that country. When they attack the consulate, it is as if they attacked our territory,” he said in a speech marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. “The evil regime made a mistake and must be punished and it shall be,” he added.
