A former Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander said today that if President Donald Trump fulfills his threats to strike Iran, his country will attack Haifa and Israeli sites and wipe Israel off the face of the earth.
Mohsen Rezai, who is the Secretary of the Expediency Council, said in a televised speech to a gathering of mourners in Tehran that "Iran's retaliation from America for the assassination of Soleimani will be harsh ... It will be Haifa and Israeli military centers within the response."
Rezaei also said that the United States undertook a serious gamble by assassinating Qasim Soleimani, stressing that conditions in the region will be difficult for American forces in the future.
For his part, the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Admiral Ali Shamkhani, stated that his country's response to the assassination of Soleimani is certainly military, but it is not limited to military action only.
Shamkhani's statement came upon receiving today, Sunday, the Syrian National Security Adviser, Major General Ali Mamlouk, who is visiting Tehran as a special envoy of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to offer condolences to Soleimani's death, according to Iran's Fars News Agency.
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"The Americans and the arrogance will soon realize that the testimony of Qasim Soleimani will be more dangerous to them than his life," Shamkhani said.
Referring to a decision passed by the Iraqi parliament regarding the removal of US forces from the country, Shamkhani added that "with the issuance of this law, the continued presence of the United States in Iraq, which is tantamount to occupation, will be ended."
In the same context, Hossein Dehghan, advisor to the Iranian guide, Ali Khamenei, for defense affairs, said that the Iranian response to the killing of Soleimani would be military and against American military sites.
Dehghan added in an interview with the American "CNN" network that the United States started the war, and it must accept the appropriate reaction to its actions.
As for the Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, he said that the decision of the US President Donald Trump to assassinate Soleimani brought him into a deep quagmire, and he threw the region's security into the unknown, and that he should bear the responsibility for that.
In remarks during a session of the Shura Council, Larijani added that Trump's statements that Soleimani's efforts to target Americans are false allegations.