The Palestinian people do not need wars that do not serve their ambitions for freedom and independence, the office of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said on Monday in response to remarks by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praising the timing of the October 7 attack.
Khamenei said Monday morning that the Hamas-led onslaught on Israel had happened exactly at the moment the region needed it, when there had been a plan “by the US, Zionist individuals, their followers and some of the region’s countries to change the equation in the region.”
The Palestinian presidency responded by saying such remarks were clearly aimed at sacrificing Palestinian blood and would not lead to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.
Khamenei, 85, was speaking at an event to mark 35 years since the death of ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, which replaced a US-backed monarchy.
He said the October 7 attack by Palestinian Islamist terror group “was a decisive blow to the Zionist regime” and put Israel “on the path that will only end in its destruction.”
Khamenei, who spoke to thousands gathered in the Khomeini mausoleum near Tehran, also said that “the Zionist regime is gradually melting before the eyes of the people of the world.”
“Sooner or later, America will have to withdraw its support,” he said.
Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran, the main Shiite Muslim power, has emerged as a bitter enemy of Israel and Israel’s Western allies, the United States and Britain.
Iran is under international sanctions over its contested nuclear program, which it insists is for civilian purposes despite evidence to the contrary.
While Israel and Iran have long fought a shadow war of killings and sabotage, Iran funds various proxy terror groups across the Middle East, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, to fight the Jewish state directly.
As the fighting in Gaza between Hamas and Israel raged after October 7, Tehran launched a barrage of rockets and missiles at Israel, most of which were intercepted with the help of Israel’s allies.
Iran has said it had no advance knowledge of Hamas’s October 7 attack but has praised it since.
The war in Gaza was launched by the unprecedented attack, in which Hamas terrorists murdered some 1,200 people and took 252 hostages.
In response, Israel launched a ground invasion in the Gaza Strip with the proclaimed objectives of dismantling Hamas and getting the hostages back.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 36,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though only some 24,000 fatalities have been identified at hospitals. The toll, which cannot be verified and does not differentiate between terrorists and civilians, includes some 15,000 terror operatives Israel says it has killed in battle. Israel also says it killed some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
The Israeli army has lost 294 soldiers during the ground offensive against Hamas and amid operations along the Gaza border. A civilian Defense Ministry contractor has also been killed in the Strip.
It is believed that 120 hostages remain in Gaza — not all of them alive.