Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the IRGC’s Aerospace Division, said on Saturday that Israeli officials made a grave miscalculation by launching attacks against the consular section of Iran’s embassy in the Syrian capital Damascus in early April.
“Iranian officials are not seeking a war. Nevertheless, they honor certain red lines which Israelis had not taken into consideration. They (Israeli authorities) did not expect Iran to respond,” Hajizadeh stated.
The IRGC general noted that Israeli officials came to know about Iran’s definite decision for the punitive strike following Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei’s speech on April 10, when he said the Tel Aviv regime “must be punished and will be punished” for its deadly strike on the Iranian diplomatic mission.
“They (Israeli officials) conveyed their threats through intermediaries. But they realized days later that Iran would not take heed of the threats and was considering delivering a response from its own territories rather than from allied groups in the region,” Hajizadeh said.
The senior IRGC commander further noted that Israeli officials reached out to their counterparts in some neighboring countries, begging them to convince Iranian armed forces to lower the intensity of their response.
“If it were not because of the Leader’s willpower, no one would have dared to take such a measure. This operation was a strategic victory for us, and added a failure to Israel’s long list of humiliations,” Hajizadeh stated.
The IRGC launched extensive missile and drone strikes against the Israeli-occupied territories on April 13. The retaliatory strikes, dubbed Operation True Promise, inflicted damage on Israeli military bases across the occupied lands.
It came after the Israeli attack on April 1 against the Iranian consulate in Damascus, located next to the embassy building in Damascus’s Mezzeh district.
The airstrike killed two senior Iranian military personnel who were on an advisory mission to Syria as well as five of their accompanying officers.
SD/PressTV