Major General Mohammad Hossein Bagheri, the Chief of Staff of the Iranian armed forces, explained yesterday that Iran had held off on retaliating for the Israeli assassination in Tehran of Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh, but could no longer after the assassination of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and an IRGC general. “After Martyr Haniyeh’s assassination, Iran went through a tough period of self-restraint amid repeated requests by the Americans and Europeans, who would ask us to exercise self-restraint so they would establish a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip (where the Israeli regime has been waging a genocidal war),” he said, reported Tasnim. “However, after Seyed Hassan Nasrallah’s and [Brigadier] General [Abbas] Nilforoushan’s martyrdom, the situation was no longer tolerable,” he added.
According to Bagheri, the targets of the “heroic” operation that “served as a response to many of the Zionists’ crimes,” included three of the Israeli regime’s main air bases. He named the bases as the headquarters of the regime’s Mossad spy agency, which he identified as the “center for terrorism,” the regime’s Nevatim air base that houses its F-35 warplanes, and the Hatzerim base that was used towards enabling Nasrallah’s assassination. The targets also featured the country’s strategic radars, the centers housing the military’s tanks and personnel carriers, and the center accommodating those of military forces acting in massacres against Palestinians in Gaza.
