Iran has upped its rhetoric against Israeli and the IDF, Yediot Aharonot reports Tuesday - this time, specifically targeting three top-ranking IDF generals.
The Iranian website Masruk posted photos and identifying details - some of them inaccurate - of three IDF officers they blame for the IAF's airstrike last month on Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah positions in Syria: Home Front Command General Eyal Eisenberg, Golani Brigade Commander Ghassan Alian, and Colonel Yaniv Asor.
According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the website has close ties to Iran's inner military circles - and reflects the views of either the IRGC or the Department of Defense in Tehran. The same site threatened to assassinate the children of Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and former premier Ehud Olmert, after an airstrike two weeks ago.
Details of the officers threatened in this publication include photos of of the officers and their ranks. Some of the information is wrong; Assor, for example, is listed as the Commander of the Bashan Division, but he has not been appointed as such. Alian, oddly, is listed as insistent upon everyone he knows addressing him as "ahi" (my brother - ed.). The authors ostensibly have included such details to claim that they are intimately familiar with the inner workings of the IDF.
The site lists all three as targets, inciting jihadists against them.
"Maybe Nasrallah announced in his speech that he settled the account with you, but with us, the Iranians, the account is not closed," the site adds, in a direct threat to the Israeli public. After the attack, Hezbollah announced that it allegedly would not seek an all-out war with Israel in retaliation.
Empty threats?
Israeli security sources have largely brushed off the threats, according to Yedioth, noting that they are familiar with the website and that it is merely another 'scare tactic' from the Islamic Republic.
Several Iranian officials have threatened Israel over the January 18 airstrike.
General Hossein Salami, deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards, threatened a missile attack on Israel, indicating it would come from Judea and Samaria and not from Lebanon; Revolutionary Guards Minister Mohsen Rafighdoost said that the strike would pave the way for a war against Israel; and a senior official in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, General Ramezan Sharif, declared that the airstrike “will accelerate the collapse of the Zionist regime.”
More recently, the head of the Iranian parliament’s Foreign Policy and National Security Committee told the Hezbollah-backed Al-Manar TV station that Iran “has the right to respond to the Israeli aerial aggression”; the Iranian Foreign Ministry distanced itself from those threats.