By: Toi Staff
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has reportedly told his Qatari counterpart, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, that the expansion of the Israel-Hamas war is “inevitable.”
“Due to the expansion of the intensity of the war against Gaza’s civilian residents, expansion of the scope of the war has become inevitable,” Iran’s Press TV quoted Amir-Abdollahian as saying in a phone call Thursday.
Iranian reports on the call stated that the two diplomats strongly condemned “the attacks of the Zionist regime against civilians,” and discussed ways through which they could “end the brutal attacks of the Israeli regime.”
Iran and its terror proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq have been threatening a regional conflict since the start of the war, sparked by Hamas’s brutal October 7 assault on southern Israel that killed some 1,400 people, most of them civilians, and saw some 240 people taken hostage in Gaza.
Following Hamas’s onslaught, Israel vowed to eliminate the terror group from the Gaza Strip, which it has ruled since 2007, and launched an operation from the air and the sea, and on the ground.
An estimated 9,500 rockets have been fired at Israel since October 7, 3,000 of them during the first day of the war alone. While the majority have been fired from inside Gaza, the Iran-backed Hezbollah has been conducting and overseeing daily assaults on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.
On Friday, November 3, the terror group’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, made his first speech since the outbreak of war, and expressed solidarity with the Palestinians and their “martyrs.”
While he predicted that Israel would fail, Nasrallah did not announce any explicit plans to broaden his Lebanese terror group’s involvement in the war, saying that “Some would like Hezbollah to engage in an all-out war, but I can tell you: What is happening now along the Israeli-Lebanese border is significant, and it is not the end.”
Elsewhere on Israel’s borders, a drone is believed to have been launched from southern Syria on Thursday, crossing into Israel via Jordan before hitting a school in Israel’s southernmost city of Eilat. In response, the IDF confirmed it had carried out airstrikes inside Syria.
Israel has also faced attempted missile strikes from the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, although all of the attempts were either intercepted or missed their targets. The latest incident on Thursday saw a rocket fired from Yemen downed by Israel’s Arrow 3 missile defense system.
Abdollahian’s warning is not the first to be uttered by Iran in recent weeks. On October 29, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza “may force everyone” to act.
“The crimes of the Zionist regime have crossed the red lines, and this may force everyone to take action,” Raisi wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Washington asks us to not do anything, but they keep giving widespread support to Israel.”
At the same time as Israel faces threats from Iranian-backed groups, US troops stationed across the Middle East have also come under fire. Since the start of the war last month, a series of rocket and drone attacks have targeted military bases hosting US and coalition forces in Iraq and Syria.
According to the Pentagon, US and coalition forces in Iraq and Syria had been targeted by drone or rocket attacks 38 times since October 17, injuring 45 US personnel.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/iranian-foreign-minister-threatens-inevitable-expansion-of-war-against-israel/