Opinion | West Asia War: Iran Must Be Made To Pay For The Attack On Israel

Like Pakistan bleeds India by a thousand cuts using terror proxies, Iran has ring-fenced Israel with genocidal jihadis to bleed it mercilessly.

Iran was happy to sponsor this low-intensity debilitating war using Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and several other sociopaths. Why bark when you have lap dogs to do the nipping?

But now Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has changed the rules of the game. Iran has ended the proxy-war. In an impulsive escalation Iran has struck Israel directly. Tehran has fired a little under 200 missiles at Tel Aviv. Most were blunted by Israel’s famed iron dome but some alarmingly still got in, touching down in the vicinity of the Mossad Head Quarter. Three Israeli military bases and several public areas have also been singed.

In a statement released a few hours after the attack Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei said he risked the frightful escalation with Israel to honour the martyrdom of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah and the Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh.

As if to rub Israel’s nose into the dirt, Iranian Members of Parliament put on a shocking impromptu display blood thirsty triumphalism. On the floor of the Majlis (Islamic Consultative Assembly), Iranian MPs shouted slogans hailing the military prowess of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for pushing the “Zionist regime” to the edge of extinction.

Not, just this, in the mad zeal to avenge the death of its terrorist collaborators, the Iranian intelligence service also issued a kill list of Israel’s leaders. The first name on the list is that of Prime Minister Netanyahu who, to underscore the animus, was branded a “terrorist.”

Iran’s bombast and the reckless military action has animated some parts of the Muslim world. Even in India, Iran has found backers. Prominent Kashmiri politician Iltija Mufti has thanked Tehran for fighting for the “oppressed”. Several others in the Kashmir valley marched for their hero.

But Iran’s decision to risk a war to defend the honour of a bunch of non-state actors, who have killed more Muslims than Jews, who are designated terrorists in half a dozen Arab countries, exposes Tehran as a villainous ‘rogue’ state.

The revenge attacks in the name of Nasrallah also mean that Iran had lost the moral high ground in this battle of legitimacy to Israel.

Readers may recall that the current spate of hostilities wouldn’t have been triggered if Iran’s proxies hadn’t crossed over into Israel on October 7 last year. On that day, Iran engineered the mass murder of thousands of innocent Israeli civilians through the Hamas.

Make no mistake Israel is the victim here. And Israel has only targeted a handful of internationally designated terrorists in the legitimate pursuit of justice for the October 7 terror attack. But Iran, on the other hand, is demonstrating an unhinged inclination to ethnically cleanse 10 million Jews.

Israel has every right to escalate and make Iran pay for its xenophobia.

Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.