Iran will give a "calculated and decisive" response to the killing of its top nuclear scientist, said a top adviser to Iran's supreme leader, while a hardline newspaper suggested Tehran's revenge should include striking the Israeli city of Haifa.
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"Undoubtedly, Iran will give a calculated and decisive answer to the criminals who took martyr Mohsen Fakhrizadeh from the Iranian nation," Kamal Kharrazi, who is also head of Iran's Strategic Council on Foreign Relations, said in a statement.
Fakhrizadeh, long suspected by Western and Israeli government of masterminding a secret nuclear weapons program, was ambushed on a highway near Tehran on Friday and gunned down in his car.
Iran's clerical and military rulers have blamed the Islamic republic's longtime enemy, Israel, for the killing. Iran has in the past accused Israel of killing several Iranian nuclear scientists since 2010.
Iranian hardline media called on Sunday for a harsh revenge.
The hardline daily Kayhan, whose editor-in-chief is appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called for an attack on the Israeli port city of Haifa, if an Israeli role in Fakhrizadeh's killing is proven.
Though the hardline paper has long argued for aggressive retaliation for operations targeting Iran, Sunday's opinion piece went further, suggesting any assault be carried out in a way that destroys facilities and "also causes heavy human casualties."
Israel, suspected of killing Iranian nuclear scientists over the past decade, has not commented on the brazen slaying of Fakhrizadeh.
Kayhan published the piece written by Iranian analyst Sadollah Zarei, who argued Iran's previous responses to suspected Israeli airstrikes that killed Revolutionary Guard forces in Syria did not go far enough to deter Israel. He said an assault on Haifa also needed to be greater than Iran's ballistic missile attack against American troops in Iraq following the US drone strike in Baghdad that killed a top Iranian general in January.
Striking the Israeli city of Haifa and killing a large number of people "will definitely lead to deterrence, because the United States and the Israeli regime and its agents are by no means ready to take part in a war and a military confrontation," Zarei wrote.
Haifa, Israel's third-largest city, is home to a major port and power plant. It is often the subject of threats made by Hezbollah, Iran's proxy in Lebanon.
Such a strike would likely draw an immediate Israeli retaliation and spark a wider conflict across the Middle East.
While Iran has never directly targeted an Israeli city militarily, it has conducted attacks targeting Israeli interests abroad in the past over the killing of its scientists, like in the case of the three Iranians recently freed in Thailand in exchange for a detained British-Australian academic.
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