Tel Aviv Tribune Net correspondents
Tehran- In contrast to what Iran wanted for the year 2024 to be different from what came before it, the New Year brought back to the minds of Iranians the memory of January 3, 2020, the date of the assassination of the former commander of the Quds Force, General Qassem Soleimani, in an American raid on the road to Baghdad airport.
Only a week after Israel assassinated the chief Iranian military advisor in Syria, General Radhi Mousavi, the Iranians – as they commemorate the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Soleimani – receive the news of the assassination of the occupation Saleh Al-Arouri, deputy head of the political bureau of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), known for his closeness to the Iranian leadership as he represents… A link between the resistance axis in Lebanon.
The Iranian authorities quickly strongly condemned “the Israeli crime that indicates Tel Aviv’s failure to achieve any of its goals in its aggression against Gaza,” and warned through Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani that “the blood of the martyr will ignite the flame of resistance to fight the occupying Zionists throughout the region.” Blaming “the Zionist entity and its supporters for the consequences of the new adventure.”
“Strategic mistake”
While Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian condemned the “cowardly terrorist operation,” Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Ashtiani considered the assassination of Al-Arouri “a strategic mistake that will cause tension in the region, and its consequences will repercussive on the Americans.”
Ali Akbar Velayati, advisor to the Iranian Supreme Leader’s Office for International Affairs, said, “The United States and its allies are the main perpetrators of these crimes in the region,” threatening that “the resistance factions and the brave Palestinian people calling for freedom will respond to the assassination crimes.”
The strategic researcher, Ali Reza Taqavinia, believes that Israel assassinated Al-Arouri to relieve the pressure accumulating on the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu due to its failure to achieve any of the goals of the ground operation in the Gaza Strip, and to confiscate the repercussions of the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to cancel one of the main provisions in the right-wing government law. Extreme controversial judicial reform.
The Iranian researcher told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that Netanyahu is seeking to prolong the ongoing war until the next US elections, believing that former President Donald Trump will win them and move to save him from the Gaza quagmire and keep him in power.
Taqvi Nia added that Tel Aviv fears that the current US administration will abandon it, especially after Washington’s decision to withdraw the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier group from the eastern Mediterranean to the US port of Virginia, which justified its latest adventure to keep its Western allies by its side in The Middle East.
“The most enthusiastic personality”
The martyr Al-Arouri was “the biggest Hamas figure that the hand of Israeli treachery could reach abroad,” according to the Iranian researcher, who summarized Israel’s goals in the assassination operation as follows:
- Recording a victory in the battle against Hamas and undermining its capabilities, especially since Al-Arouri is known to be the architect of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation.
- Eliminate Al-Arouri as the main coordinator between Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah.
- Eliminating efforts to organize popular resistance in the West Bank.
For his part, the academic researcher in strategic affairs, Salah al-Din Khedive, reads the assassination of al-Arouri in the context of the escalation of tension resulting from the Israeli aggression on Gaza and the escalation of the possibilities of expanding its scope and turning it into a regional war, describing the crime as “an Israeli return to the policy of assassinations against senior Hamas leaders that had been frozen throughout.” “Two decades.”
Speaking to Tel Aviv Tribune Net, Khedive explained that the intensity of tension in the region has reached dangerous levels, especially on the fronts of southern Lebanon and the Red Sea, adding that Tel Aviv has become accustomed during the past years to exporting its internal crises to the Lebanese arena through bombing, bombing, and destabilization there.
Khedive believed that “the position of the Israeli entity, that its latest operation is directed against Hamas only and not Hezbollah and the Lebanese state,” aims not to provoke the Lebanese resistance, stressing that the Israeli escalation in the southern suburbs, Hezbollah’s stronghold, cannot go unnoticed by the party, which it had previously threatened. It led a strong response to any assassination on Lebanese soil.
Nature of response
The same spokesman considered that the assassination operation puts Hezbollah at a crossroads: it will either launch a violent response deep inside Israel and accept the repercussions of the response, including the possibility of expanding the war and reaching Lebanese territory, or it will wait for revenge, similar to the assassination of the leaders Imad Mughniyeh and Mustafa Badr al-Din, and lose. Balancing the power he imposed during the last two decades.
Pointing out that Israel had targeted Mughniyeh and Badr al-Din in Syria and not in the Lebanese capital, Khedive believes that failure to retaliate against Al-Arouri may motivate Tel Aviv to assassinate more Hezbollah leaders in the southern suburbs.
The Iranian academic expected that Hezbollah would take a middle path to respond to the assassination of Al-Arouri, so that it would not require a comprehensive Israeli attack on Lebanese territory.
The strategic researcher, Ali Reza Taghnia, shares Khedive’s analysis regarding the inevitability of the resistance’s response to the assassination of Al-Arouri, but he believes that continuing the current battle, draining Israel’s capabilities, and perpetuating its defeat by Hamas “is sufficient to put it on the path to gradual collapse and bring its demise closer.”
As for social media platforms, Iranians interacted widely with the assassination of Al-Arouri, and a segment of them argued that the assassination – in conjunction with negotiations aimed at reaching a humanitarian truce in Gaza – only shows Tel Aviv’s acceptance of defeat and its attempts to score a victory, even outside the Gaza Strip.
While some Iranian circles read the assassination of Al-Arouri as an Israeli attempt to lure Hezbollah into the battle after the failure of the Netanyahu government to lure Iran through the assassination of Radhi Mousavi last week in Damascus, some tweeters recalled the necessity of implementing the orders issued by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei regarding the necessity of cutting off the flow of energy to the Palestinian territories. Occupied.