Iranian leaders said on Tuesday that Israel’s airstrikes on an Iranian embassy compound in Damascus, Syria, which killed three top Iranian commanders, would not go unanswered. Government supporters took to the streets and called for retaliation against Israel.

The strike, on part of the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus, killed three generals in Iran’s Quds Force and four other officers, making it one of the deadliest attacks of the yearslong shadow war between Israel and Iran.

In a statement, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, vowed that Israel would be “punished by the hands of our brave men.”

President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran said the attack was an “inhumane assault in brazen violation of international law,” in comments reported by Tasnim, a semiofficial news agency. He added that it would not go unanswered, but gave no details of how Iran might respond.

Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, said in an earlier post on the social media site X that Iran had summoned the Swiss ambassador after midnight local time and asked that an important message be delivered to Washington: That as Israel’s ally, the “U.S. must answer” for Israel’s actions. Switzerland acts as the United States’ representative in the absence of diplomatic relations between Tehran and Washington.

The spokesman for the leadership of Iran’s Parliament, Seyyed Nezamoldin Mousavi, told Iranian state media that “an appropriate response is a national request by the people of Iran.”