Iran says Israel, US to be targeted if Washington attacks

Tehran: Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on Wednesday said they would strike Israeli cities with missiles if the Islamic country was threatened, the media reported.

The Revolutionary Guards also said that they will continue increasing Iran’s defensive capabilities despite US pressure to scrap its ballistic missile programme, Xinhua reported citing Mizan News Agency.

On the same day, a senior Iranian cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami warned that if his country was attacked by the US and Israel, Tehran will give a tit-for-tat fightback.

Khatami told worshippers attending Eid prayers in Tehran that talks with US President Donald Trump is impossible.

“Americans say you should accept what they say in the talks, which is not negotiation, but dictatorship. The Iranian nation would stand up against dictatorship,” he was quoted as saying.

Iran’s



Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has rejected before Trump’s offer of “unconditional talks on a new nuclear deal,” saying that “if they (Americans) want to meet, that’s fine; if they don’t, I couldn’t care less.”

Khatami also stressed “the price of a war with Iran is very high,” adding that if the Americans harm his country in the slightest way, “the US and its main ally in the region, the Zionist regime (Israel), would be targeted.”

On May 8, Trump pulled Washington out of the nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and vowed to reinstate sanctions against Tehran to make the latter “change behaviour.”

The US government on August 7 re-imposed sanctions on Iran on non-energy areas and will slap the remaining sanctions on November 5 that concentrate on areas including energy, shipping and ports.