Israel seeking revenge on Palestinian civilians after failure versus resistance: Iran FM

Iran’s foreign minister has said the Israeli regime has been seeking to revenge itself on Palestinian civilians following its failure versus the resistance.

Hossein Amir-Abdollahian made the remarks in Tehran on Tuesday, meeting with foreign ambassadors and representatives of international organizations in the Islamic Republic.

The regime launched a war against the Gaza Strip on October 7 following an operation by the territory’s resistance groups, which killed some 1,200 Israeli settlers and military forces and led to the captivity of hundreds more. More than 14,000 Palestinians have been killed in the brutal Israeli war so far.

The top diplomat noted that children, women, and the elderly comprised as much as 70 percent of the Palestinian fatalities, denouncing the Israeli savagery as “genocide” and “war crime.”

Iran, he said, “will keep striving to have the perpetrators of these crimes tried at international tribunals even after conclusion of the war.”

Amir-Abdollahian, meanwhile, noted that the United States was, on the one hand, asking Iran to invite the resistance groups defending Gaza to exercise self-restraint, and throwing all-out support behind the Israeli regime on the other.

He called the two-sided US attitude “completely paradoxical.”

The foreign minister noted that Iran did not have any “proxy groups” in the region, suggesting that it was not up to the Islamic Republic to exert pressure on the resistance outfits. He, meanwhile, reminded that the US was expecting the resistance to exercise self-restraint, while itself had not stopped short of throwing military support behind the Israeli regime throughout the course of the war “even for a single hour.”

Amir-Abdollahian also pointed to the US and Israel’s so-called post-war schemes for Gaza, referring to Washington and Tel Aviv’s suggestions that the territory would not be ruled by the Hamas resistance movement following the warfare.

He laid emphasis on the Palestinian nation’s right to self-determination, and reiterated the Islamic Republic’s proposal that the crisis in Palestine had to be resolved through a referendum attended by all of its original inhabitants.