By Elwely Elwelly
JERUSALEM/BEIRUT (Reuters) -Iran warned Israel on Tuesday against any attacks on the Islamic Republic a week after Tehran fired a barrage of missiles on it, putting the Middle East on edge.
Any attack on Iran’s infrastructure will be met with retaliation, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said, warning Israel against attacks on his country.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military piled more pressure on Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah, eliminating the commander of Hezbollah’s headquarters in a strike in the area of Beirut, it said in a statement on Tuesday.
If confirmed, the death of Suhail Hussein Husseini would be a result of Israel’s strategy of inflicting major blows by assassinating leaders and commanders of Hezbollah and its ally Hamas, which has been fighting Israel in Gaza for a year.
In the biggest blow to Hezbollah in decades, Israel killed its leader Hassan Nasrallah with an air strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs late last month.
The attacks have raised fears that the United States, Israel’s closest ally, and the Islamic Republic of Iran would be sucked into a full-blown conflict in the oil producing Middle East.
Tension between arch-foes Iran and Israel is running high after years of shadow war and assassinations have turned into direct confrontations that have put the region on edge.
Israel has been weighing options to respond to Tehran’s ballistic missile attack last week, carried out in response to Israel’s military action in Lebanon.
U.S. news website Axios cited Israeli officials as saying Iran’s oil facilities could be hit, which would be a serious escalation that could drive up global oil prices.
On Friday, President Joe Biden said he would think about alternatives to striking Iranian oilfields if he were in Israel’s shoes, adding he thought it had not yet concluded how to respond to Iran.
(Reporting by Steven Scheer, Joseph Campbell and Yomna Ehab; Additional reporting by Monica Naime; Writing by Michael Georgy, Mark Heinrich, Alex Richardson, Patricia Zengerle and Michael Perry; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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