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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates โ Iranโs supreme leader on Saturday threatened Israel and the U.S. with โa crushing responseโ over attacks on Iran and its allies.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke as Iranian officials are increasingly threatening to launch yet another strike against Israel after its Oct. 26 attack on the Islamic Republic that targeted military bases and other locations and killed at least five people.
Any further attacks from either side could engulf the wider Middle East, already teetering over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip and Israelโs ground invasion of Lebanon, into a wider regional conflict just ahead of the U.S. presidential election Tuesday.
โThe enemies, whether 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 to the resistance front,โ Khamenei said in video released by Iranian state media.
The supreme leader did not elaborate on the timing of the threatened attack, nor the scope. The U.S. military operates on bases throughout the Middle East, with some troops now manning a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, battery in Israel.
The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier likely is in the Arabian Sea, and Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said Friday that more destroyers, fighter squadrons, tankers and B-52 long-range bombers would be coming to the region to deter Iran and its militant allies.
The 85-year-old Khamenei had struck a more cautious approach in earlier remarks, saying officials would weigh Iranโs response and that Israelโs attack โshould not be exaggerated nor downplayed.โ Iran has launched two major direct attacks on Israel, in April and October.
But efforts by Iran to downplay the Israeli attack faltered as satellite photos analyzed by the Associated Press showed damage to military bases near Tehran linked to the countryโs ballistic missile program, as well as at a Revolutionary Guard base used in satellite launches.
Iranโs allies, called the โAxis of Resistanceโ by Tehran, also have been severely hurt by ongoing Israeli attacks, particularly Lebanonโs Hezbollah and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Iran long has used those groups as both an asymmetrical way to attack Israel and as a shield against a direct assault. Some analysts believe those groups want Iran to do more to back them militarily.
Iran, however, has been dealing with its own problems at home, as its economy struggles under the weight of international sanctions and it has faced years of widespread, multiple protests. After Khameneiโs speech, the Iranian rial fell to 691,500 against the dollar, near an all-time low. It had been 32,000 rials to the dollar when Tehran reached its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
Gen. Mohammad Ali Naini, a spokesman for Iranโs paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which controls the ballistic missiles needed to target Israel, gave an interview published by the semiofficial Fars news agency just before Khameneiโs remarks were released. In it, he warned Iranโs response โwill be wise, powerful and beyond the enemyโs comprehension.โ
โThe leaders of the Zionist regime should look out from the windows of their bedrooms and protect their criminal pilots within their small territory,โ he warned. Israeli air force pilots appear to have used air-launched ballistic missiles in the Oct. 26 attack.
Khamenei on Saturday met with university students to mark Students Day, which commemorates a Nov. 4, 1978, incident in which Iranian soldiers opened fire on students protesting the rule of the shah at Tehran University. The shooting killed and wounded several students and further escalated the tensions consuming Iran at the time that eventually led to the shah fleeing the country and the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The crowd offered a raucous welcome to Khamenei, chanting: โThe blood in our veins is a gift to our leader!โ Some also made a hand gesture โ similar to a โtimeoutโ signal โ given by the slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in 2020 in a speech in which he threatened that American troops who arrived in the Mideast standing up would โreturn in coffinsโ horizontally.
Iran will mark the 45th anniversary of the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis this Sunday, following the Persian calendar. The Nov. 4, 1979, storming of the embassy by Islamist students led to the 444-day crisis, which cemented the decades-long enmity between Tehran and Washington that persists today.
An attack on a central Israeli town early Saturday injured 11 people as Iranโs supreme leader vowed a punishing response to Israelโs attack last week.
In central Israel on Saturday, a predawn strike fired from Lebanon hit a building in the predominantly Israeli Arab town of Tira, injuring 11 people, according to the Magen David Adom emergency service.
Lebanonโs Iran-backed Hezbollah group said on Saturday that it had used missiles and explosive drones to target military and intelligence facilities in northern and central Israel. It claimed responsibility for firing missiles toward the Israeli militaryโs Unit 8200 base in Glilot, on the edge of Tel Aviv, and for firing rockets toward military facilities in Zvulun. Tira is about 12 miles from Glilot. Hezbollah also said it had targeted central Israelโs Palmachim Air Base with explosive drones, saying they โscored precise hits on targets.โ
Israelโs military did not confirm whether any of the three Hezbollah targets had been hit and said it had no comment on the groupโs claims.
Meanwhile, an Israeli airstrike on a southern suburb of Beirut on Saturday afternoon wounded 11 people, the Lebanese Health Ministry said.
In a separate incident, a Lebanese ship captain was taken away by a group of armed men who landed on a coast north of Beirut, Lebanese authorities said Saturday. Officials said the incident occurred Friday at dawn and authorities are investigating whether Israel was involved.
There has been no immediate Israeli comment on the matter. In the past, Israel has carried out commando operations deep inside Lebanon to kidnap or kill Hezbollah and Palestinian officials.
In the Gaza Strip, Israel has also stepped up its offensive against Hamasโ remaining fighters, raising concerns about humanitarian conditions for civilians still there.
A series of Israeli strikes on Nuseirat, a refugee camp in central Gaza, killed at least 42 people, more than a half of them women and children, in 24 hours, Dr. Marwan Abu Naser, director of Al-Awda Hospital that received the casualties, told the Associated Press. An additional 150 were wounded, he said.
Israelโs war in Gaza has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel and took some 250 hostages back to Gaza. Health officials inside Hamas-run Gaza do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but say more than half of the dead in the enclave are women and children.
Gambrell writes for the Associated Press. AP journalists Adam Schreck in Jerusalem, Bassem Mroue in Beirut, Natalie Melzer in Tel Aviv and Shlomo Mor in Tira, as well as Times staff, contributed to this report.
