Iran’s supreme leader threatens Israel and the US with a “crushing response” to the Israeli attack

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Iran’s supreme leader on Saturday threatened Israel and the US with a “crushing response” to attacks on Iran and its allies.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke as Iranian officials increasingly threatened to launch another strike against Israel after the Oct. 26 attack on the Islamic Republic that targeted military bases and other locations and killed at least five people.

Any further attacks by either side could engulf the wider Middle East, already reeling from the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip and Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon, into a wider regional conflict just ahead of the presidential election from the US on Tuesday.

“The enemies, whether it is the Zionist regime or the United States of America, will definitely receive a crushing response to what they are doing to Iran and the Iranian nation and the resistance front,” Khamenei said in a video released by Iranian state media.

The supreme leader did not elaborate on the timing of the threatened attack, nor the scope. The US military operates throughout the Middle East, with some troops now manning a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, battery in Israel.

Khamenei, 85, took a more cautious approach in earlier remarks, saying officials would weigh Iran’s response and that Israel’s attack “should not be exaggerated or downplayed.”

Khamenei met with students on Saturday to mark Students’ Day, which commemorates an incident on November 4, 1978, in which Iranian soldiers opened fire on students protesting the shah’s rule at Tehran University. The shooting killed and injured several students and further intensified the tensions that were consuming Iran at the time, eventually leading to the Shah’s flight from the country and the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The crowd gave Khamenei a raucous welcome, chanting: “The blood in our veins is a gift to our leader!” Some also made a hand gesture made by slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2020, in a speech in which he threatened that US troops would “go back in their coffins”.

Iran will mark the 45th anniversary of the US Embassy hostage crisis on Sunday, according to the Persian calendar. The November 4, 1979, assault on the embassy by Islamist students led to the 444-day crisis that cemented the decades-long enmity between Tehran and Washington that persists today.