Iran says it has duty to punish Israel over killing of Hamas leader in Tehran

Crisis meeting of Arab states this week may set agenda for retaliation as countries urge Iran to show restraint

Iran has called on foreign ambassadors based in Tehran to warn of the country’s moral duty to punish Israel for what it sees as its “adventurism” and law-breaking in assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader, a week ago in the Iranian capital.

Iran has also secured an emergency meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) on Wednesday where it will try to press Arab states to back its right to take reprisal actions against Israel.

Many leaders in the Gulf are willing to condemn Israel’s actions but have also been calling for Iran to show restraint. The meeting will be held at the OIC headquarters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Previous efforts by the deceased Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi to win the support of Gulf states for military action or direct economic sanction failed.

It is possible that Iran will wait for the outcome of the OIC meeting to launch its planned reprisals, but the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has indicated he is expecting Iran to launch a series of coordinated strikes from Monday. President Joe Biden is due to meet his national security team in Washington at 2.15 pm local time, approximately 10pm in Tehran, by which time it is likely to be clear if Iran is planning to launch an attack overnight.

Tehran airport cancelled a number of incoming and outgoing flights on Sunday evening, suggesting it was fearful that civil aircraft may be caught up in military activity. In a previous military exchange in January 2020 between the US and Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian civil flight from Tehran to Kyiv, killing all 176 occupants on board.

Russia’s security council secretary, Sergei Shoigu, arrived in Tehran on Monday for talks with the Iranian leadership, including the president, Masoud Pezeshkian. Shoigu, previously Russia’s defence minister, was removed from that post by Vladimir Putin but remains central to Russia’s defence co-operation with Iran. There is no sign that Russia is urging restraint.

Iran is trying to portray its planned missile strikes as necessary to try to re-establish regional deterrence after the US’s failure to control its ally Israel.

In a meeting with foreign diplomats, the acting foreign minister, Ali Bagheri, said: “We all have a moral duty and responsibility not to remain silent in the face of the occupation, displacement and genocide of the Palestinian nation.” He added: “Indifference and appeasement in the face of evil and injustice is a kind of moral negligence and causes the spread of evil.”

Speaking at his weekly briefing, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, Nasser Kanaani, said action from Tehran was inevitable. “Iran seeks to establish stability in the region, but this will only come with punishing the aggressor and creating deterrence against the adventurism of the Zionist regime [Israel],” said Kanaani, as he called on the US to stop supporting Israel and added that the international community had failed in its duty to safeguard stability in the region and should support the “punishment of the aggressor”.

He added: “Terror is in the essence of the Zionist regime, and its survival depends on the continuation of the approach of state terrorism. The world should strongly condemn this crime, secondly, it should support the punishment of the aggressor and avoid any approach that means supporting the aggressor.”

His remarks were directed at the Gulf states, including Jordan, that cooperated with western powers on 13 April of this year to reduce the impact of the Iranian attack on Israel in April following the assassination of IRGC commanders in an Iranian consulate in Damascus on 1 April.

Inside Iran, those who have counselled caution, or even suggested that the country could diplomatically exploit Israel’s overreach, seem to have lost out to those who have argued that there should be a coordinated attack on Israel mounted by Hezbollah, Hamas, Iraqi militant groups, the Houthis in Yemen and Iran itself.

In the April episode, it took Iran 12 days to decide and launch its response. It used that time not only to calibrate its response, but also send out messages it was not seeking a regional war, messages that in turn led the US to restrain Israel in its own response.

Some of this messaging about the scale of both side’s reaction is absent, but the longer the pause between the assassination of Hamiyeh and Iran’s response, the more time exists for diplomacy to reduce the scope for misunderstandings.

On Monday, the top IRGC commander, Hossein Salami, repeated the group’s threat that Israel “will receive punishment in due time”, adding that Israel was digging its own grave.