TEL AVIV – A senior Likud minister on Sunday boasted that Israel is the only country in the world that has been “killing Iranians.”
“For the past two years, Israel has been the only country in the world killing Iranians,” Regional Cooperation Minister Tzachi Hanegbi told the Kan public broadcaster. “We have attacked the Iranians hundreds of times in Syria. Sometimes they admit it, sometimes foreign publications expose the matter, sometimes a minister, sometimes the chief of staff. But everything is a coordinated policy.”
“The Iranians are very limited in their responses, and it’s not because they don’t possess the capabilities, but because they understand that Israel means business. We are very clear on issues of national security,” he added.
“At the moment, the only army in the world to fight Iran is the Israeli army,” he said.
Iran’s state-run Press TV later responded to Hanegbi’s remarks by saying, “This is how Israelis are freely and proudly talking about killing Iranians! Just imagine what would happen if it was the other way around!”
In an interview with Army Radio, Hanegbi also referred to Iran’s seizure of a British tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. The interviewer asked where the U.S.’s “cautious response” to the confrontation between London and Tehran leaves Israel.
“The Europeans … try at all costs to placate and entreat Iran just so that the stupid nuclear agreement will not fall apart before their eyes,” he said.
Earlier Friday, a drone dropped explosives on a military base in northern Iraq, killing at least one person, the army and paramilitary sources said.
A report by Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya claimed that Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards fighters, as well as members of the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group, were killed in the attack.
No claim of responsibility was forthcoming. A source in the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force told Kuwait’s Al-Jareda newspaper that Israel was behind the attack.
According to the report, an Israeli drone was launched from the U.S.’s a-Tannaf base in Syria.