President Joe Biden on Wednesday vowed that American support for Israel is ‘ironclad’, amid fears the Middle Eastern nation will soon be attacked by Iran.
“As I told Prime Minister Netanyahu, our commitment to Israel security against these threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad. Let me say it again: ironclad. We’re going to do all we can to protect Israel security,” Biden said at a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
Biden’s top diplomat, Anthony Blinken, affirmed his words and told Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant on a phone call that the US would stand behind Israel if Iran decides to attack.
An attack by Iran or its proxies against military and government targets in Israel are imminent, Bloomberg News reported citing intelligence sources, with one source saying it is more a matter of when, not if.
Tensions in the Middle East today flared after an Iranian news agency published a report on X saying all airspace over Tehran had been closed for military drills, before quickly removing the post and denying it had ever issued the news.
Iran has promised to retaliate for an Israeli strike in Syria on April 1st that killed several senior Iranian commanders when Israeli forces hit the Iranian Embassy building in Damascus.
The airstrike killed General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who led the elite Quds Force in Lebanon and Syria until 2016, according to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. It also killed Zahedi’s deputy, Gen Mohammad Hadi Hajriahimi, and five other officers.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that Israel ‘must be punished and it shall be’ for the strikes on the embassy. He noted in a speech Wednesday for Eid al-Fitr that attacking an embassy ‘means that they have attacked our soil.’
“The evil regime made a mistake and it should be punished and will be punished,” he added, according to IRNA, the state news agency.
Iran’s main proxy group is Hezbollah, which is based in southern Lebanon and has been trading fire with Israeli forces almost daily since the war in Gaza erupted in October.
Israel has not explicitly acknowledged it was behind that attack but it has put its military on alert
There are fears an open war between Israel and Iran could turn into a much broader conflict, after Israel’s foreign minister Israel Katz said in an apparent response to Ayatollah’s promise of retaliation that Israel would respond if Iran attacks it from its own soil.
Late last week, Iran warned Israel that none of its embassies were safe following the IDF strike.
Israel has already been battling enemies to the north, announcing on Sunday it had launched air strikes on eastern Lebanon and hit Hezbollah infrastructure sites after the Iran-backed group downed an Israeli drone, as both sides continue to trade fire amid escalating regional tensions.
The Israeli army said in a statement that fighter jets struck a military complex and three other sites belonging to Hezbollah in the eastern city of Baalbek. It said the attack was in response to Hezbollah’s downing of an unmanned aerial vehicle in Lebanese airspace, which the group identified as the Israeli-made Hermes 900 drone.
Hezbollah said it later fired dozens of Katyusha rockets that hit an air defence base in the occupied Golan Heights, in retaliation for the Israeli raids on eastern Lebanon.
Hezbollah has been trading fire with Israel across Lebanon’s southern border since October 8, a day after Hamas launched an devastating attack on Israel that triggered Israel’s war in Gaza and led to escalating regional tensions.
Israeli shelling has killed around 270 Hezbollah fighters and around 50 civilians, security sources say.
In southern Lebanon some 90,000 people have also been displaced, while more than 96,000 Israelis have been displaced from the country’s northern border area, officials from both sides say.
The US and other countries have sought a diplomatic resolution to the exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and Israel.
Hezbollah said it would not halt fire before a ceasefire is implemented in Gaza. Late last week, Israel pulled most of its military brigades out of Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
The Hamas stronghold has been the main focus of Israel’s offensive in recent months. That took Israeli troop levels in Gaza to some of the lowest levels since the war began, raising questions about plans for the future course of the war, especially the fate of the southernmost Gaza city of Rafah.
Israel says Rafah is Hamas’s last stronghold and the war will not be complete until Hamas is destroyed. But the area now shelters some 1.4 million people – more than half of Gaza’s population.
Just a day after troops were pulled back, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that a date had been set for IDF soldiers to invade Rafah, though did not disclose when this would happen.
“Today I received a detailed report on the talks in Cairo, we are constantly working to achieve our goals, first and foremost the release of all our hostages and achieving a complete victory over Hamas,” Netanyahu said on Monday.
“This victory requires entry into Rafah and the elimination of the terrorist battalions there. It will happen – there is a date.”
