TEHRAN -- Iran on Tuesday 
dismissed calls by France, Germany and the United Kingdom to stand down its pledge to punish Israel after the assassination of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last month.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan’ani said in a statement that the request “lacks political logic and contradict principles of international law” and also “constitutes public and practical support” for the Zionist regime.
The European countries “raised no objection to the international crimes” of Israel and “impudently asked Iran not to respond to a violation of its sovereignty and territorial integrity”, he said.
Kan’ani said Iran is determined to deter the occupying regime of Israel and called on the three countries to “once and for all stand up against the war in Gaza and the warmongering of Israel”.
Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran, where he was attending the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on July 31.
The attack on Haniyeh, in which his bodyguard was also killed, came after Hezbollah senior commander Fuad Shukr was killed in an Israeli attack in Beirut, ratcheting tensions in the region amid Israel’s war on Gaza that has killed nearly 40,000 people.
“The inaction of the United Nations Security Council and the extensive political and military support of Western governments to the Zionist regime are the main factors behind the regional expansion of the Gaza crisis,” Kan’ani said.
On Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer issued a joint statement calling for de-escalation.
“We call on Iran and its allies to refrain from attacks that would further escalate regional tensions and jeopardize the opportunity to agree a ceasefire [in Gaza] and the release” of Israeli captives, it said.
Scholz and Starmer also held separate phone calls with Pezeshkian on Monday, their governments said.
Starmer asked Pezeshkian to refrain from attacking Israel, saying that war was not in anyone’s interest, the prime minister’s office said.
Scholz appealed to Pezeshkian “to do everything possible to prevent a further military escalation”, expressed “great concern about the danger of a regional conflagration in the Middle East” and said “the spiral of violence in the Middle East must be broken now”, his spokesperson said in a statement.
But Pezeshkian said Iran has the “right to respond to aggressors”. Iran, he said, views punitive response to aggression as the legitimate right of world states and a proper mechanism to stop atrocities and brutalities.
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has called it the Islamic Republic’s duty to avenge the Palestinian resistance leader’s blood.
“The criminal and terrorist Zionist regime martyred our dear guest in our homeland and left us bereaved, but it also set the ground for a harsh punishment for itself,” the Leader said after the assassination.