Iran’s supreme leader on Saturday threatened Israel and the United States with an “excessive response” to attacks on Iran and its allies.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke as Iranian officials increasingly threatened to launch another strike against Israel after an Oct. 26 attack on the Islamic Republic that targeted military bases and other facilities and killed at least five people.
Any further attacks by either side could draw the wider Middle East, already embroiled in the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon, into a wider regional conflict just before Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election.
“The enemies, both the Zionist regime and the United States of America, will certainly receive a crushing response to what they do to Iran, the Iranian nation and the resistance front,” Khamenei said in a video released by Iranian state media.
The supreme leader did not specify the timing of the threatened attack, nor its purpose. The US military operates throughout the Middle East, and some soldiers are currently stationed in a high-altitude missile defense (THAAD) battery in Israel.
Khamenei, 85, had taken a more cautious approach in his earlier comments, saying officials would appreciate Iran’s response and that Israel’s attack “should neither be exaggerated nor underestimated.”
On Saturday, Khamenei met with university students to mark Students’ Day, which commemorates an incident on November 4, 1978, in which Iranian soldiers opened fire on students protesting the shah’s rule. in the University of Tehran. The shooting killed and injured several students and further heightened the tensions that consumed Iran at the time, eventually leading to the Shah’s flight from the country and the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The crowd greeted Khamenei by chanting, “The blood in our veins is a gift to our leader!” Some even made a hand gesture made by slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2020 in a speech in which he threatened that US troops would “turn into coffins”.
