Israel has all but claimed responsibility for the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who’s motorcade was ambushed in a suburb east of Tehran yesterday. To make the point, the Times of Israel republished the full text of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech from April of 2018 when he unveiled the Iranian nuclear archive which had supposedly been stolen by the Mossad from a warehouse in Tehran. In that speech, Netanyahu had identified Fakrizadeh as the head of Project Amad, the code name for Iran’s nuclear weapons program until 2003. “Remember that name, Fakhrizadeh,” Netanyahu said then. The Jerusalem Post gleefully reported that nobody remembered his name, “"Save for a few, including those who assassinated him on a busy street in Damavand, east of the capital of Tehran, on Friday.” The Post concludes that the message of Fakrizadeh’s death is clear: “Remember, no nuclear scientist is safe.”
Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, wrote in Axios that the killing of Fakrizadeh was an escalation of the US-Israeli maximum pressure campaign against Iran. “The killing of Fakhrizadeh comes as part of what seems as an effort by the Trump administration and the Netanyahu government to use the time left until President-elect Joe Biden assumes office for more pressure on Iran,” Ravid writes. “The Trump administration hasn’t concealed its ambition to make it harder for Biden to renew talks with Iran and rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal. Sanctions, covert operations and threats for military strike are part of this effort.”
The escalation Ravid referred to goes back at least to a Nov. 16 New York Times story (which may well be NY Times fake news) claiming that Trump had met with his national security team on Nov. 10, the day after he fired then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, to seek options for striking Iran’s nuclear program. Ever since then, rumors of possible US or Israeli strikes on Iran have been played up, clearly to increase the pressure on Iran. This includes a Nov. 25 story by Ravid in which he claimed that the Israeli Defense Forces had been ordered to prepare for the possible fall out of a US strike on Iran. They are undertaking such measures not because of any intelligence or assessment that Trump will order such a strike, but because senior Israeli officials anticipate “a very sensitive period” ahead of Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, Ravid claimed.
The Iranians are portraying the assassination as both a terrorist attack and an assault on the country’s scientific capabilities in general. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei both promised that Fakrizadeh’s killing will not go unanswered. “With his great, enduring scientific efforts, he sacrificed his life on the path of God & the lofty status of martyrdom is his divine reward,” Khamenei wrote on twitter. “All relevant administrators must seriously place two crucial matters on their agendas: 1st to investigate this crime and firmly prosecute its perpetrators and its commanders, 2nd to continue the martyr’s scientific and technological efforts in all the sectors where he was active.”
