The death of Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter crash in the northwest of the country last weekend, was obviously not mourned in Israel, the great enemy and target of the ayatollahs’ regime in the Middle East.
However, it was also not celebrated with much emphasis: Israeli politicians and international analysts were unanimous in stating that the threat that Tehran poses to the country should not be mitigated with the change in the Iranian presidency – some even warn of greater risks.
Iran supports two terrorist groups with whom Israel is fighting on two fronts at the moment, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, as well as Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who are targeting Israeli vessels in the Red Sea.
In the midst of the war in Gaza, which began in October last year with Hamas attacks, Iran and Israel exchanged fire directly in April, an unprecedented event, as Tehran used to attack Israelis only through the terrorist groups it supports and finances.
It all started on April 1, when an attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus took place, attributed to Israel and in which 13 people died: seven members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, including Brigadier General Mohamed Reza al Zahedi and his assistant, General Mohammad Haji Rahimi, and six Syrian citizens.
An Israeli official told Axios that the country’s intelligence had been monitoring Zahedi for a long time because he was tasked with arming Hezbollah and other pro-Tehran groups in Lebanon and Syria to carry out attacks against Israel. According to this source, an “operational window” to kill him was only opened a few days before the attack in Damascus.
On the 13th, Iran reacted with an offensive with more than 300 drones and missiles on Israeli territory, 99% of which were intercepted by Israel and allied forces, from countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and France. No one was killed and there were no serious injuries. Six days later, there was a rejoinder, with an Israeli attack hitting a military base in the Iranian province of Isfahan.
This exchange of hostilities and the conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah made many people speculate whether the Israelis could be behind Raisi’s death, but Israel promptly denied the accusation and experts consider the hypothesis very unlikely, due to a very simple fact: there would be no no substantial gain from an operation of this type.
Lawmaker Avigdor Liberman, president of the opposition Yisrael Beytenu party, summed up the general sentiment, telling news site Ynet that nothing should change in Iran’s policies in the Middle East.
“For us, it doesn’t matter, it won’t affect Israel’s attitude [em
relação ao Irã]. Iran’s policies are set by the supreme leader [aiatolá
Ali Khamenei],” Liberman said.
“However, there was no doubt that the president was a brutal man. We won’t shed a tear,” he quipped.
In an interview with The New York Times, Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-Israeli professor at Reichman University in Israel, stated that, under current circumstances, researchers on the Iranian nuclear program and military leaders are more important to the ayatollahs’ regime than the president of the country.
“His absence or presence would not have much impact,” Javedanfar said. “The same cannot be said of a nuclear scientist, working on a program that could produce a nuclear bomb to threaten Israel.”
Javedanfar stated that Raisi was nothing more than “a foot soldier of the supreme leader” and “a loyal servant, with little influence within the regime.”
In other words: what interests Israel is Khamenei’s succession, not the presidential election in Iran at the end of June – especially because the person elected will necessarily be someone who needs to pass the ayatollah’s scrutiny.
In an article for The Jerusalem Post, Jacob Nagel, former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former acting head of Israel’s National Security Council, stated that “any president or foreign minister [o titular da pasta, Hossein
Amir-Abdollahian, também morreu no acidente] chosen will continue on Iran’s current path, and some may even intensify the nuclear approach and attempt to persuade the supreme leader to formally advance the weapons system.
[nucleares]which has not happened until now.”
“The US and Israel must attack the octopus head and its tentacles together. It is time to apply strong financial pressure on the Islamic Republic and not ease, as was done recently”, warned Nagel.
#death #Irans #president #Israel