Iranian newspaper's article on Sunday called for the necessity that Iran should attack the Israeli port city of Haifa if Israel carried out the killing of the scientist who founded the Islamic Republic’s military nuclear program in the early 2000s. Kayhan published the piece written by Iranian analyst Sadollah Zarei, who argued Iran’s previous responses to suspected Israeli airstrikes that killed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard forces in Syria did not go far enough to deter Israel. He said an assault on Haifa also needed to be greater than Iran’s ballistic missile attack against American troops in Iraq following the U.S. drone strike in Baghdad that killed a top Iranian general in January.
Iranian president Rouhani accused Israel of killing the country’s top nuclear scientist, an incident fanning the flames of tension in the region. “Once again, the evil hands of global arrogance were stained with the blood of the mercenary usurper Zionist regime,” he said, referring to Iran’s arch-enemy Israel.
Haifa, on the Mediterranean Sea, has been threatened in the past by both Iran and one of its proxies, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
U.S. intelligence agencies and U.N. nuclear inspectors have said the organized military nuclear program that Fakhrizadeh oversaw was disbanded in 2003, but Israeli suspicion of Tehran’s atomic program and his involvement has never ceased.
Israel, suspected of killing Iranian nuclear scientists over the past decade, has not commented on the brazen slaying of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. A military-style ambush Friday on the outskirts of Tehran reportedly saw a truck bomb explode and gunmen open fire on the scientist, killing him and a bodyguard.
Gen. Mohammad Baqeri, Iran's chief of army staff, accused “terrorists” affiliated with Israel of killing Fakhrizadeh, calling it a “heavy blow” to the country’s defense.
Iranian officials have blamed Israel for Friday’s attack, raising the specter of renewed tensions that could engulf the region, including U.S. troops stationed in the Persian Gulf and beyond during President Donald Trump’s remaining weeks in office.While Kayhan is a small circulation newspaper in Iran, its editor-in-chief Hossein Shariatmadari was appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and has been described as an adviser to him in the past.
Such a strike likely would draw an immediate Israeli retaliation and spark a wider conflict across the Mideast. While Iran has never directly targeted an Israeli city militarily, it has conducted attacks targeting Israeli interests abroad in the past over the killing of its scientists, like in the case of the three Iranians recently freed in Thailand in exchange for a detained British-Australian academic.
Israel also is widely believed to have its own nuclear weapons, a stockpile it neither confirms nor denies possessing.