An opinion piece published by a hard-line Iranian newspaper on Sunday suggested Iran should attack the Israeli port city of Haifa if Israel carried out the killing of a scientist linked to its disbanded military nuclear program.
Though the hard-line Kayhan newspaper has long argued for aggressive retaliation for operations targeting Iran, Sunday’s opinion piece went further, suggesting any assault be carried out in a way that destroys facilities and “also causes heavy human casualties.”
Israel, suspected of killing Iranian nuclear scientists over the past decade, has not commented on Friday’s slaying of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
Iranian officials roundly have blamed Israel for the attack, raising the specter of renewed tensions that could engulf the region, including US troops stationed in the Persian Gulf and beyond.
Kayhan published the piece written by Iranian analyst Sadollah Zarei, who argued Iran’s previous reactions to suspected Israeli airstrikes that killed Revolutionary Guard forces in Syria didn’t go far enough to deter Israel.
Striking Haifa and killing a large number of people “will definitely lead to deterrence, because the US and the Israeli regime and its agents are by no means ready to take part in a war and a military confrontation,” Zarei wrote. He said an assault on Haifa needed to be greater than Iran’s ballistic missile attack against American troops in Iraq following the S drone strike that killed a top Iranian general in January.
Haifa, on the Mediterranean Sea, has been threatened in the past by both Iran and one of its proxies, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
