Diplomatic pressure mounted Monday to avert an escalation between Iran and Israel following high-profile killings that have sent regional tensions soaring.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said late Sunday that his country was “determined to stand against” Iran and its allied armed groups “on all fronts”.
As its war against Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza nears the 11th month, Israel has been bracing for retaliation from the Tehran-aligned “Axis of Resistance” for the killing of two senior figures.
Palestinian armed group Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran on Wednesday in an attack blamed on Israel, which has not directly commented on it.
The killing came hours after an Israeli strike on Beirut killed the military chief of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, Fuad Shuk.
Tehran said on Monday that “no one has the right to doubt Iran’s legal right to punish the Zionist regime” for Haniyeh’s killing.
United States President Joe Biden, whose country has sent extra warships and fighter jets to the region in support of Israel, held crisis talks on Monday with his national security team.
The head of the U.S. military command covering 바카라게임 the Middle East, General Michael Kurilla, arrived in Israel and met Israel’s military chief Lieutenant-General Herzi Halevi for a security assessment, an Israeli military statement said.
Iraqi sources said a base hosting U.S. troops in Iraq came under rocket fire on Monday, after an American strike on July 30 killed four pro-Iran Iraqi fighters.
“Rockets were launched at Ain al-Assad base” in Anbar province, said a military source, while a commander in a pro-Iran armed group told AFP that at least “two rockets targeted” the base, without saying who had carried out the attack.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday urged all sides in the Middle East to avoid “escalation,” his spokesman said.
U.S. news site Axios earlier reported that Blinken told his counterparts from the G7 nations that any attack by Iran and Hezbollah could happen as early as Monday.
