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78 killed in Israel’s attacks on Iran: UN Ambassador
…attacks could push Iran to pursue nuclear weapon
Missiles launched from Iran are intercepted, as seen from Tel Aviv [Jamal Awad/Reuters]
The overwhelming majority of them are civilians, including women and children, he told the ongoing UNSC session.
Israel has attacked several Iranian nuclear facilities and military sites, and carried out assassinations of top military officials and nuclear scientists. An initial wave of strikes was carried out on Friday morning. A second, separate attack on the city of Tabriz, northwest Iran, was reported by local media later on Friday.
On Friday afternoon, the semi-official state media group, the Iranian Fars news agency reported “unofficial statistics” showing that more than 70 people had been killed and more than 320 were injured in Israel’s attacks.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei warned that Israel faces a “bitter and painful” fate following the attack.
“By God’s will, the powerful hand of the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic will not let it [Israel] go unpunished,” he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a prerecorded message that the strikes early on Friday were aimed at hurting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and ballistic missile factories.
Jim Walsh, a US-based nuclear expert, says he expects back-and-forth firings between Israel and Iran over the next few days.
But the most important thing, he explained, will be if the Iranian authorities decide to pursue a nuclear weapon in response to Israel’s attacks on the country. “For 20 years, they’ve refused to cross that line,” Walsh told Al Jazeera.
“I think there’s strong scholarly evidence – and certainly, if you look at the politics of the moment – to believe that in this attack, Israel will get the exact opposite of what it wanted, which is Iran is going to decide to go for the bomb.”
Walsh said that would spell disaster not just for the Middle East, but for the world.
“What is it that Iran can do? It doesn’t have an air force. It doesn’t have Hezbollah and Syria to launch missiles. It cannot invade … and so all it really has is missiles, and a decision to be able to pursue nuclear weapons – having been forced into this position by the [Israeli] attack,” he said.
That “is just bad news all around, for the region and globally.”
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