TEHRAN -- The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps warned France against falling into the Israeli “false-flag trap,” after Paris blamed Tehran for a cyberattack that disabled refrigeration systems at hundreds of French supermarkets last month.
IRGC spokesman Brigadier General Hussein Mohebbi said in a post on X that Paris should be wary of a plot by “the Zionist regime,” adding that “unlike the United States and the Zionist regime, civilians are not on the IRGC’s target list.”
He described the French allegation as “the Zionists’ worn-out scenario to fuel Iranophobia and rally support across Europe.”
France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, claimed without the least evidence that the IRGC was behind the October 11-12 cyberattack, which raised temperatures in refrigerators at roughly 700 supermarkets, forcing stores to discard perishable food and causing some equipment to catch fire. 
Paris took the strange measure of summoning Iran’s ambassador and is seeking European-level sanctions.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry rejected the accusation as “baseless and one-sided,” saying it is intended to divert attention from France’s own administrative failures. 
“A government that cannot even manage the temperature of its own refrigerators now seeks to shift the blame onto foreign actors,” the ministry said.
The IRGC’s warning comes amid a broader pattern of cyber operations targeting civilian infrastructure that has been repeatedly traced to Israel and its allies. 
Israel has also been linked to the mass exploitation of civilian mobile phone networks across the region. 
The Pegasus spyware produced by Israel’s NSO Group was used by client governments to target tens of thousands of phones belonging to journalists, activists, politicians, and even members of royal families, according to investigations by a consortium of media outlets.
More recently, thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies detonated simultaneously across Lebanon in September 2024, killing dozens and wounding more than 3,000 people, including children and civilians who were not members of Hezbollah. 
The United Nations human rights chief at the time said the attack was “shocking” and that its impact on civilians was “unacceptable,” warning that targeting thousands of people without knowing who was holding the devices violated international law.
The Stuxnet worm, widely reported to have been developed jointly by the United States and Israel, damaged centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility around 2010, and the Flame virus was later identified as part of the same covert campaign against Iranian computer networks.