New Delhi:
The commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Monday that destroying arch-rival Israel was an “achievable goal”. “This sinister regime must be wiped off the map and this is no longer ... a dream (but) it is an achievable goal,” Major General Hossein Salami said. The comments came amid particularly heightened international tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme.
Four decades on from Iran’s Islamic revolution, “we have managed to obtain the capacity to destroy the imposter Zionist regime”, he said.
Iranian generals routinely express the desire to destroy Israel or claim to be able to wipe out Tel Aviv.
However, official discourse in recent years has generally taken care to clarify that the Jewish state will cease to exist because of its own “arrogance”, not because of an attack by Iran.
Recently, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused the U.S. of initiating a cyberwar with his country and warned that “any war the United States starts it won’t be able to finish.”
Iran fired up advanced centrifuges to boost its enriched uranium stockpiles on September 7 as the latest scaling back of commitments under the crumbling 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers.
Last year, the relations between Washington and Tehran soared after US President Donald Trump pulled out of a nuclear accord with Iran, negotiated under former president Barack Obama.
The United States also imposed sanctions on Iran’s sovereign wealth fund, whose board of trustees includes President Hassan Rouhani, as well as Etemad Tejarate Pars, a company that the Treasury Department said had sent money internationally on behalf of Iran’s defence ministry.
Earlier, Trump while addressing the UNGA had already ruled out any possibility of easing economic pressure on Iran. Tensions between Iran and US ratcheted up after the Trump administration announced that it would unilaterally force all countries to stop buying Iran’s oil, which is its major export.
