Iran wants “all Arab and Islamic countries” to unite against Israel in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attack that ignited a war in Gaza.
“Today, the most obvious issue before us is that all Arab and Islamic countries should agree on a single and clear position to support the rights of the Palestinian nation and the oppressed people of Gaza,” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi told Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, according to Iranian media.
BLINKEN PROMISES US WILL BACK ISRAEL AS NETANYAHU VOWS TO DESTROY HAMAS
U.S. and British forces are moving into the eastern Mediterranean in a bid to deter Iran and its proxies, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken conducts his own diplomatic tour of the Middle East to support Israel and discourage a wider war. Iran has launched a diplomatic campaign by phone and in person to rally Middle East leaders against Israel, while Iran-backed terrorist organizations threaten to expand the conflict.
“We have come prepared for you outside Palestine, just as we were inside Palestine, and the events that unfolded in the Gaza Envelope shall be mirrored in other battlegrounds,” Palestinian Islamic Jihad spokesman Abu Hamza said Thursday, according to Iranian media.
The threat of a multifront war has loomed over Israel for decades, due to the predominance of the Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border. In recent years, Israeli forces made multiple strikes on Iranian or Iran-controlled forces that intervened alongside Russia in the Syrian civil war to prop up Assad’s regime in a bid to prevent Tehran from laying down new military entrenchments on the Israeli-Syrian border.
Those strikes continued on Thursday with strikes on airports in Damascus and Aleppo, according to Syrian state media.
"This aggressive attack lines up with the ongoing attempts by the occupation [Israeli] authorities aimed at spreading crises, escalating the situation in the region and diverting attention from the war crimes and crimes against humanity as well as the massacres they are committing against innocent Palestinians in the Gaza Strip," the Syrian Foreign Ministry said, according to Tass, a Russian state media outlet.
Raisi also spoke with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in their first conversation since Iran and Saudi Arabia brokered a diplomatic rapprochement under China’s auspices. It is a high-stakes diplomatic maneuver for the young royal, who is trying to obtain security guarantees from the United States as part of a deal to establish diplomatic relations with Israel — a negotiating process galvanized by Israeli, Saudi, and U.S. misgivings about the threats posed by Iran.
“During the call, they discussed the ongoing military escalation in Gaza,” a bulletin published by Saudi state media said of their conversation. “The Crown Prince emphasized that the Kingdom is exerting maximum effort to engage with all international and regional parties to halt the ongoing escalation, and he asserted the Kingdom's opposition to any form of civilian targeting and the loss of innocent lives. He stressed the necessity of adhering to the principles of international humanitarian law and expressed deep concern for the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza and its impact on civilians.”
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which operates in Gaza and reportedly participated in the terrorist attack in Israel on Saturday, is a “wholly-owned subsidiary of Tehran,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior fellow Aaron David Miller, a former State Department historian who has coordinated previous rounds of Arab-Israeli negotiations, said in a discussion of the terrorist attacks this week. State Department officials announced that Blinken’s visit to Israel is the first leg of a trip that will take him to Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
"Across each of these engagements, we will continue pressing countries to help prevent the conflict from spreading, and to use our leverage with Hamas to immediately and unconditionally release the hostages,” Blinken said in Tel Aviv. “We’ll also discuss how we can continue to make real our affirmative vision for a region that's more peaceful, more prosperous, more secure, more integrated.”
The intensifying conflict is a military and humanitarian crisis with potentially far-reaching diplomatic implications, as the terrorists have signaled their hope that the war will prevent the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia from brokering a deal to normalize relations between the Gulf Arab monarchy and the Jewish democracy.
"Those who rush towards normalization with the Zionist project must know, and they do know, that this is their acknowledgment that Palestine is not ours, and that Jerusalem with its mosque is not ours," Palestinian Islamic Jihad head Ziad al Nakhalah said Friday on the eve of the terrorist rampage across southern Israel.
Raisi declared that the terrorist attack and the Israeli response should undermine the normalization talks.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“Today, all those who made public their relations with the Zionist regime under the pretext of defending the rights of the Palestinians were disgraced, and it has been proven to the whole world that the Zionist regime is in its weakest state,” Raisi told Assad, according to the Iranian readout.
Blinken hopes to blunt that diplomatic threat. “We've been engaged, as you know, in trying to support and advance the possibility of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia and other countries that do not yet have normalized relations with Israel,” he said. “Now who opposes normalization? Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran. I think that speaks volumes as well.”