Iran vows to take revenge over ‘killing’ of top nuclear scientist

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• According to Iran’s adviser Kamal Kharrazi, the nation is plotting a “calculated and decisive” response against Israel, following the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist.
• Fakhrizadeh was killed in a military-style ambush on Friday and Iran accused Israel of leading the attack.
• The Iranian parliament said that Israel should be held responsible for Fakhrizadeh’s killing.

Calls for retaliation intensify as Iran is planning a “calculated and decisive” response after its top nuclear scientist was assassinated, the country’s supreme leader adviser said.

If Israel was the one responsible for the assassination, an opinion published in a newspaper warned that Iran may take offense against the port city of Haifa that could result in “heavy human casualties.”

According to Iran’s adviser Kamal Kharrazi, who also leads the nation’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations, Iran would undoubtedly “give a calculated and decisive answer to the criminals who took Martyr Mohsen Fakhrizadeh from the Iranian nation.”

The founder of the Islamic Republic’s military nuclear program roughly two decades ago, Fakhrizadeh died in a military-style ambush on Friday at the Tehran suburbs. 

Iran’s clerical and military rulers claimed that Israel led the attack, citing a history of killings of other nuclear scientists in the previous years. The Jewish state, though, has not yet commented about the attack.

Iranian analyst Sadollah Zarei, who wrote the opinion piece in Kayhan daily, said that Iran’s responses with the past suspected Israeli airstrikes were not effective enough to scare Israel.

Zarei suggested that Iran should get revenge by attacking the city of Haifa, which would destroy extensive facilities and would also cause “heavy human casualties.”

In his opinion piece, Zarei wrote that such attack would “definitely lead to deterrence, because the United States and the Israeli regime and its agents are by no means ready to take part in a war and a military confrontation.”

The author argued that Iran’s retaliation should be bigger than the country’s ballistic missile attack against US troops in Baghdad in January after the Americans killed top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.

Despite being a small scale newspaper, Kayhan Daily’s editor-in-chief Hossein Shariatmadari was a former adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

It was not the first that Israel’s Haifa was threatened to be assaulted. Aside from Iran, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has also warned to attack the Jewish city.

In a closed-door meeting about Fakhrizadeh’s death on Sunday, the Iranian parliament, headed by speaker Mohammad Baqer Ghalibah, said that the nation’s adversaries should pay for what they did.

“The criminal enemy does not regret it except with a strong reaction,” he said in a broadcast on Iranian state radio. A public session of lawmakers saw them chant: “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”

Source: Fox News