TEHRAN -- Iran blasted the United States on Friday for sustaining an unequal military relationship with Israel at significant cost to American taxpayers, while rejecting descriptions of the two terrorist regime’s aggression as an “Iran conflict”.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the United States has spent $11 billion on missiles for Israel over the past three years and fired more interceptors to protect its ally than Israel had used itself.
“That is not a symbiotic relationship. It is a parasitic one,” Araghchi said in a post on X, sharing figures compiled by independent policy analyst Stephen Semler.
The figures estimated that U.S. forces had fired 609 ballistic missile interceptors to protect Israel against Iranian retaliatory strikes between October 2023 and September 2026. They did not include interceptors used to protect U.S. military assets across West Asia from Iranian attacks.
Semler has separately estimated that the United States fired about 1,800 Patriot missiles between February and September 2026. Other estimates suggest that military operations against Iran have depleted up to 82% of pre-war U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor stockpiles and 61% of Patriot missile supplies.
The depletion of air defense inventories has raised concerns about Washington’s ability to sustain prolonged military operations. Replenishing the stocks could take years at a production rate of about 600 missiles annually, according to the estimates cited in the reports.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil

 Baghaei said on Thursday that describing the aggression as an “Iran conflict” obscures the identity of the parties responsible for the terrorist war.
“The refusal to call aggression by its name is not neutrality; it is moral evasion,” Baghaei said in a post on X. “Peace cannot be built by appeasing aggressors, legitimizing aggression, condemning the victim, or sacrificing fundamental principles,” he added.