Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian warned Israel that “time is running out” during a televised interview earlier this week and said that it is “inevitable” that Iran’s proxies in the region will soon intervene in the Jewish state’s war with Hamas, unless Israel capitulates.
“Time is running out very fast,” Abdollahian said during a live televised interview with Iranian state television on Monday night. “If the war crimes against the Palestinians are not immediately stopped, other multiple fronts will open and this is inevitable.”
The Iranian official provided the interview after returning to Tehran from meetings with terrorist leaders throughout the region. He met with the top political official of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in Qatar, and the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut. He also met with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in Damascus.
In the televised interview, Amir Abdallohian said these leaders, who comprise “the resistance,” told him that “their hands are on the trigger.” He said that “pre-emptive action” was possible “in the coming few hours” because those leaders would “naturally not allow the Zionist regime to do whatever it wants in Gaza.”
Tuesday night, the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Syria echoed these sentiments and tweeted, in Hebrew, “time is up.”
These ominous warnings come in the aftermath of the bombing of a hospital in Gaza City, which was immediately blamed on a strike by Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Major news outlets, like the New York Times, quickly ran with the Palestinian Health Ministry’s version of events. However, the IDF has asserted that Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a terrorist group operating within the Gaza Strip, caused the blast when it misfired a rocket.
“On October 17, at around 19:00, the PIJ fired a missile salvo toward Israel,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry wrote in an official statement. “One of the missiles misfired, landing on the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, causing severe damage, killing at least several Palestinians and injuring many more. ”
The IDF also released a recoding of what they say are Hamas terrorists acknowledging that the blast was caused by a misfired PIJ rocket.
Although most major media outlets have retracted the original version of the story, the narrative that the IDF targeted a hospital has caused outrage throughout the Middle East. Anti-Israel protests have erupted throughout the region, including the West Bank.
President Biden’s trip to Jordan to meet with King Abdullah II, which was scheduled to occur after his current visit to Israel, was cancelled in the wake of news of the hospital blast.