Tuesday’s missile launch at Israel is Tehran’s response for the recent assassinations of the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC has said.
Iran launched several hundred ballistic missiles, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which also claimed to have shot down most of the incoming fire.
“In response to the martyrdom of Ismail Haniyeh, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and the martyr Nilforoshan, we struck at the heart of the occupied territories,” the IRGC said in a statement released about 30 minutes after the first missiles struck.
“If the Zionist regime responds to our attack, our next strikes will be more destructive,” the statement added.
Haniyeh was the leader of Hamas and was killed in Tehran in early August. Nasrallah was the long-time leader of Hezbollah and was killed in an Israeli airstrike last week. Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoshan was the IRGC deputy commander of operations who was meeting with Nasrallah when Israeli jets bombed a building on their Beirut bunker.
The Iranian mission at the UN also made an announcement about the missile attack.
“Iran’s legal, rational, and legitimate response to the terrorist acts of the Zionist regime—which involved targeting Iranian nationals and interests and infringing upon the national sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran—has been duly carried out. Should the Zionist regime dare to respond or commit further acts of malevolence, a subsequent and crushing response will ensue,” the mission said in a statement posted on X.
Earlier in the day, anonymous US officials told American media that Washington had warned West Jerusalem of an impending launch by Tehran. The US was expecting an attack similar to a strike in April in which some 300 missiles and drones were used.
The US embassy in West Jerusalem instructed all its staff and their families to ”shelter in place” due to potential rocket and drone strikes, but did not specifically mention Iran.
The reported strike comes after Israeli ground troops invaded southern Lebanon early on Tuesday, in an operation Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as targeting Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shia militia.
