TEHRAN -- The former
commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) on Wednesday touched on the blows that the occupying regime of regime has received and continues to receive from Iran, saying many of those operations have remained confidential.
In an interview with Tasnim news agency, Major General Muhammad Ali Jafari commented on certain claims by Zionist officials about recent incidents in Iran.
“The Zionist regime and its officials know better what blows they have received from the Islamic Republic so far, some of which are even still in progress as they (Zionists) are being hit from that area,” the general said.
The former IRGC commander said the Zionist regime has suffered those blows in different countries across the region, from the Islamic resistance in various regional countries, and even inside the occupied Palestinian territories.
It is unfortunate that the Islamic Republic cannot declare and publicize many of the blows it has dealt to the Israeli regime, the general said, adding that those operations have often been kept confidential.
However, he said, when the Zionist regime carries out a terror attack, like the cowardly assassination of IRGC member Hassan Sayyad Khodaei, it announces it publicly.
The unfair assassination attack, which took place when the late IRGC serviceman was inside his car in front of his house without any bodyguard, had no operational value for the Zionist regime in technical terms and resembled the blind assassination attacks that MKO terrorists used to conduct in the 1980s, the general added.
Iran and the resistance front have dealt several times greater blows to the Zionist regime before and after the martyrdom of Sayyad Khodaei, but their details cannot be disclosed, General Jafari said.
“When the Zionist regime conducts one operation, it knows that it will receive a response several times greater,” he added.
The former commander went on to say that the enemies are resorting to psychological and media campaigns to claim responsibility for other accidents that happen in Iran, while they are aware that such incidents have nothing to do with them.
A senior Israeli researcher has said Israel’s policy toward Iran is failing by “a thousand cuts”.
Danny Citrinowicz, a senior fellow at the Institute of Policy and Strategy (IPS) at Reichman University in Herzliya and a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs, touched on the occupying regime’s strategy of sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program and assassinating its nuclear scientists which “now appears to have been extended to target other scientists and officers in charge of missile programs and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), as well as members of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC)’s Quds Force”.
To a bystander, it seems that Israel is succeeding in creating confusion and mayhem in the ranks of the Iranian government, he wrote in The Atlantic Council, the outlet of an American think tank in the field of international affairs.
“But the reality of Iran’s nuclear program, revealed on June 6 during the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors meeting in Vienna, reveals the depth of Iran’s progress in this area despite Israel’s efforts to thwart it,” he said.
“Iran continues to enrich tens of kilograms of uranium to 60 percent purity, install advanced IR6 centrifuges in an underground facility at Fordow, and produce uranium metal. All these activities would have been banned under the JCPOA that Israel vehemently opposes and successfully lobbied against when Donald Trump was in office (Trump quit the agreement in 2018 despite Iran not violating the deal).”
In the face of these developments, the outlet said, Israel continues to hold a questionable position of demanding “zero enrichment” while relying on an unrealistic “Plan B.”
“Continued economic sanctions, various covert operations, and a threat to bomb Iran’s nuclear installations haven’t stopped the country’s nuclear program nor changed its behavior, and it is very doubtful if it will succeed in the future,” it said.
The Trump era concept of “maximum pressure” no longer works in a world short of oil and willing to bypass sanctions, the Israeli researcher wrote.
“Iran’s revenues from oil exports under the current sanctions regime illustrates this fact. Not only is Iran already adept at bypassing sanctions, but the Ukraine war has broadened a “coalition of the sanctioned,” including Russia and China, who are willing to defy U.S. threats.
“The Biden administration is also unwilling to press harder, given high gasoline prices. Arab neighbors of Iran across the Persian Gulf are also fearful of pushing Iran into a corner and it seems that they aren’t keen to enforce the sanctions on Iran, a position that led to the Trump administration openly criticizing the United Arab Emirates for turning a blind eye to sanctions evasion.
Therefore, “strategically, Israel hasn’t achieved its goal of preventing Iran from having an advanced nuclear program,” he said.
According to Citrinowicz, the base for the Zionist regime’s policy is still founded on the thought that one can deprive Iran from its nuclear capabilities, even though Iran’s nuclear program is not what it was a decade ago.
“Iran has succeeded in overcoming significant technological barriers, especially in the field of enrichment and centrifuge production. The knowledge in Iran is broad and exists in the minds of countless nuclear scientists—far more than can be eliminated,” he said.
“Moreover, according to a Chicago Council survey, the nuclear program enjoys support in Iran and, therefore, even if the leader of the country or the regime changed tomorrow, it is unlikely that the program would be abandoned,” he added.
The occupying regime, according to the researcher, through its strategy of a thousand cuts in a so-called “war between the wars” in Syria and Lebanon “has moved to the forefront of the battle against Iran in a way that exposes it to Iranian retaliation”, while the attacks “have not changed Iran’s posture nor undermined Lebanese Hezbollah”.
“There is a growing gap between the statements of senior Israeli officials and the reality on the ground,” he said.
The bottom line is that Tel Aviv’s “Iran strategy is failing”, the researcher concluded.