President Ebrahim Raeisi has said that the Israeli regime has fallen short of realizing all of the goals that it had sought by launching its ongoing war against the Gaza Strip.
The chief executive made the remarks in an interview in Tehran on Wednesday with representatives of five Arabic-language television networks, namely Lebanon’s al-Manar, Iraq’s al-Etejah TV, and the Palestinian al-Aqsa TV and Palestine Today as well as Yemen’s al-Masirah.
“Israel did not achieve any of its goals of occupying Gaza and eliminating the resistance,” he said.
Still referring to the war waged by the Israeli regime, Raeisi said, “What the Zionist regime has done shows that it has grown desperate in the face of the Palestinian resistance.”
The regime launched the war on October 7 following an operation, dubbed al-Aqsa Storm, by the territory’s resistance groups, which killed some 1,200 Israeli settlers and military forces and led to the captivity of hundreds more.
Raeisi described the operation as the Palestinian people’s “legitimate defense of their right,” which was prompted by their growing “impatient with [the Israeli regime’s] incessant oppression.”
“A nation, whose home is usurped, whose family members are imprisoned and martyred, and whose farms are destroyed, enjoys the right to legitimate self-defense” by whatever logical standard, the president said.
The Palestinian operation, Raeisi added, inflicted “military, security, and intelligence defeat” upon the Israeli regime.
The president, meanwhile, pointed to the regime’s killing of more than 14,500 Palestinians so far during the war, saying, “Killing of women and children does not translate into victory.”
The massacre of women and children “has created an unprecedented atmosphere of anti-Zionist hatred across the world,” Raeisi concluded.
Iran FM warns against failure to extend truce
Also on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who has traveled to the Lebanese capital of Beirut, warned against failure to extend a four-day truce that has been agreed between the Israeli regime and Gaza’s Hamas resistance movement.
“If the truce does not continue, the conditions of the region will change and the scope of the war will expand,” he told Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen television network in an interview.
“We have previously warned that if the war continues, the opening of new fronts is inevitable. The Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, and Yemenis cannot stand by and watch what is happening,” the top diplomat said.
The Israeli regime has carried out sporadic attacks against southern Lebanon during the course of the war, which has sparked a firefight between the regime and Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement.
Ever since the onset of the war, Yemen’s Armed Forces have also carried out several rounds of operations against the occupied territories in support of Palestinians, vowing to continue their attacks as long as the regime sustains its aggression.
Iraq’s resistance groups have, meanwhile, been attacking bases housing American troops on several occasions as means of confronting the United States, Israel’s biggest and oldest ally, which has been supplying the regime with thousands of consignments of arms since the onset of the war.
Amir-Abdollahian also pointed to the United States and Israel’s so-called post-war schemes for Gaza, referring to Washington and Tel Aviv’s suggestions that the territory may not be ruled by Hamas in the aftermath of the warfare.
“Israel and the United States are unable to eliminate Hamas in Gaza, and the movement will remain in Palestine, and the end of the war will be in favor of the resistance,” he concluded.
