Israel will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, and will take military action to prevent that if all other options fail, Foreign Minister Israel Katz said Tuesday in response to Iranian threats to "level Tel Aviv from Lebanon."
"Israel is not the helpless protesters being slaughtered by the ayatollah regime in Iran and Iraq. We will be able to respond forcefully to any threat or attack," Katz said.
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Katz also said that Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah had been "exposed" as a proxy of Iran, rather than as a defender of Lebanese interests.
On Monday evening, a senior adviser in Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps Morteza Ghorbani said that if Israel made even the smallest error when it came to Iran, Tehran would "level Tel Aviv from Lebanon."
Ghorbani claimed that Iran had no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons, and said that if Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were to issue instructions to attack Israel, the latter would raise its hands in surrender.
Ghorbani was speaking in response to an interview Katz gave to the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, in which the foreign minister said that Iran must face the threat of military action in addition to sanctions.
"The Iranians have no idea who they're dealing with. If they realized that 1,000 Tomahawk missiles could be fired at them, they would behave differently. We know that there is no real threat to the regime itself," Katz told the paper.
