Any attack on Israel will trigger an “even more powerful” response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Tehran on Wednesday.
“I say this to the tyrants in Iran: Do not mistake us. If we are attacked, we will respond with power,” Netanyahu said in remarks at the annual state memorial ceremony for Revisionist Zionist movement leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky at the Mount Herzl Military Cemetery in Jerusalem.
“It will not be a replay. It will be a different event altogether,” the prime minister warned.
Netanyahu also reiterated his longstanding pledge to prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring nuclear weapons.
“As long as I am the prime minister of Israel, Iran will not obtain nuclear weapons,” he declared, saying the Jewish state had “removed the immediate danger” of a nuclear-armed Tehran in the two military operations over the past two years.
“We settled accounts with those who wish us harm, from Gaza to Yemen, from Lebanon to Iran. We acted with power, took the offensive and used stratagems against the Iranian axis, which for years had invested hundreds of billions of dollars to make us bleed. We brought back our hostages, down to the very last one,” he said.
Israel had fundamentally revised its national security doctrine following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, abandoning a policy of containment in favor of taking the fight to the enemy, he continued.
“There is no more containment of threats. There are no more terrorist armies on our borders,” said the prime minister, noting security zones established inside the Gaza Strip, Southern Lebanon and Syria.
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“The ‘Gaza Envelope’ is now inside Gaza. The ‘Lebanon Envelope’ is inside Lebanon. The ‘Golan Envelope’ is inside Syria,” he said, adding that the Israel Defense Forces would remain in the buffer zones “as long as we face danger from neighboring countries.”
Thousands of Gazan terrorists infiltrated the Jewish state’s southern border on Oct. 7, murdering some 1,200 people, wounding thousands and kidnapping 251, and triggering the War of Redemption.
The war quickly expanded beyond Gaza, with Jerusalem also fighting Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, battling terrorist groups in Judea and Samaria, conducting military operations in Syria, confronting Houthi attacks from Yemen, carrying out strikes inside Iranian territory and responding to attacks from Iraq.
