Agencies
Tehran
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says Israeli leaders are acting victoriously and boasting, but they have not succeeded.
“Were you victorious in Gaza? Is someone a victor if they kill forty-something thousand women and children with bombs and fails to realise even a single one of the goals set out from the start?” he told a gathering of followers in Tehran.
“Did you destroy Hamas? Did you free your captives from Gaza?” The Iranian leader added that Israel also said it would destroy Hezbollah, but failed to do so even though it killed its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah.
“Hezbollah is alive. The Palestinian resistance is alive, Hamas is alive, jihad is alive. You are not victors, you have been defeated.”
Khamenei said it is also no victory for Israel to occupy vast swaths of land in Syria because it faced no resistance. He promised that “brave Syrian youth will undoubtedly push you out of there.”
Khamenei also anticipates a renewed resistance struggle by Syrians against the country’s new leadership structures following the overthrow of president Bashar al-Assad.
“We expect a new [resistance] group to form,” Khamenei said.
The Syrian youth in particular would resist those who had repeatedly made their country and their future insecure, the cleric said according to the ISNA news agency.
The fall of Syria’s long-time ruler was a severe blow for Iran, which has seen its entire Middle East policy weakened as a result.
Al-Assad was considered a strategically important ally in Iran’s self-proclaimed “axis of resistance” against its arch-enemy Israel.
Syria also served as a corridor for Iranian arms deliveries to the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. The country supported al-Assad generously both financially and militarily and branded the Syrian Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group - which led the regime overthrow - as a terrorist organization.
