A high-ranking Iranian political official is claiming that the US administration has decided to kill Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Deputy Parliament Speaker Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh tweeted on Thursday: "Apparently, the terrorist United States, making a very wrong calculation, assessed positively the results of its assassination of the shahid [martyr] Qassem Soleimani and has instructed the forces under its command to carry out similar actions against other commanders of the resistance front, especially Hassan Nasrallah."
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In January of this year, Soleimani – former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps' elite Quds Force – was killed in a US drone strike.
Ghazizadeh continued: "The enemy [will] soon receive retribution from Iran, in the name of Allah."
Ghazizadeh is considered a close associate of the civilian arm of the IRGC and leaders of the radical conservative faction in the Iranian parliament.
Middle East analyst Yoni Ben-Menachem from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs says it is not impossible that Iran has not directly blamed the US and Israel for a recent series of explosions and fires at sensitive facilities because doing so would force it to take swift retaliatory action, like it did after Soleimani was killed.
"It's possible that the Iranian regime prefers to focus right now on responding to the Iraqi front and putting military pressure on the US to withdraw from Iraq by attacking its forces using Iranian-aligned militias and taking out pro-American figures, like Iraqi analyst Hisham al-Hashimi, to score points on the political home front," Menachem explains.
In January, JCPA researchers said that in the aftermath of Soleimani's death, Hezbollah was afraid that its leaders could be the next target for the US, as part of US President Donald Trump's new approach to the war on global terrorism.
JCPA research fellow Lt. Col. (res.) Michael Segall, who was formerly head of the Iran desk at the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate's Research Division, notes that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a meeting this week with the prime minister of Iraq that Iran would avenge Soleimani in a reciprocal blow.
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