Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi vowed on Monday to keep up Tehran’s “unlimited support” for terror groups throughout the region while avoiding a direct clash with Israel, according to official Iranian media.
The policy of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s government is to “provide unlimited support to the resistance,” said Araghchi. “We will support the resistance front, which has established itself as a reality in the region.”
The “Axis of Resistance” includes Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Yemen’s Houthi rebels and other Iranian-backed terrorist groups in the Middle East.
The Israeli army “has so far failed to achieve its main goal of destroying Hamas,” Araghchi claimed in remarks cited by the Tasnim news agency.
The diplomat stressed that the Islamic Republic “remains vigilant against traps that might be set to draw us into the conflict. We are monitoring regional developments with intelligence and awareness.”
In separate remarks at a press conference on Monday, Pezeshkian told reporters that his government would “never” give up its ballistic missile program as demanded by the United States and European nations.
“If we don’t have missiles, they will bomb us whenever they want, just like in Gaza,” he charged, calling on the international community “to first disarm Israel before making the same demands to Iran.”
The Islamic Republic, he claimed, “has never been the initiator of war, and the history of the past 100 years shows that we have not been an initiator of war.”
On April 14, Iran launched 300 drones and missiles at Israel in the first-ever direct attack on the Jewish state from Iranian soil. It said the attack was retaliation for a strike that killed a top Iranian general in Damascus.
In June, Tehran threatened that an Israel Defense Forces operation against Lebanese Hezbollah terrorists could lead to an “obliterating war” with all of Iran’s proxies, warning that “all options are on the table.”
Iran has also threatened revenge following the July 31 assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the top “political” leader of Hamas, who died in an explosion at his Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps guesthouse in Tehran. Iran and Hamas have accused Israel of killing Haniyeh.
There have also been Iranian threats of a push toward a nuclear bomb. In May, an adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said that Tehran would weaponize its nuclear program if Israel “threatens its existence.”
Araghchi’s interim predecessor, Ali Bagheri Kani, said on July 15 that Hamas’s Oct. 7 cross-border massacre in Israel’s northwestern Negev region shifted the balance in the Middle East “in favor of the resistance.”
As many as 500 terrorists affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad based in the Gaza Strip trained in Iran leading up to the Oct. 7 assault, The Wall Street Journal reported in late October.
Iran has officially hailed the attacks as a “success,” saying the murder of some 1,200 people, mainly Jewish civilians, was a response to the 2020 killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani by the United States.
