CIA director appears to claim that Israel responding to Iranian attack could trigger widespread escalation in the ongoing Middle East conflict.
By World Israel News Staff
The head of the Central Intelligence Agency said that despite an international push for calm, the prospect of a widespread regional war in the Middle East remains a looming threat.
CIA director Bill Burns appeared to shift the onus of responsibility for the potential worsening of the war on Israel, saying that Jerusalem must respond cautiously to Iran’s recent ballistic missile attack.
“We face the very real danger of a further regional escalation of conflict,” Burns said at the Cipher Brief Annual Threat Conference in Georgia on Monday.
“The Middle East is a place where complicated stuff happens all the time,” he continued.
Burns said he believed that Israel’s leadership was “weighing very carefully” potential responses to Iran’s unprecedented attack, which marked the second time in 2024 that Tehran directly attacked the Jewish State.
But, Burns said, “misjudgments” on the part of Israel could trigger an escalation of the conference.
During his remarks, Burns did not include the context that Iranian proxy groups, including the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terror group and the Houthis in Yemen, have repeatedly attacked Israel across multiple fronts in the past year.
The CIA head also downplayed the Iranian nuclear threat, claiming that “we do not see evidence today that the Supreme Leader has reversed the decision that he took at the end of 2003 to suspend the weaponization program.”
Burns then admitted that Iran had stepped up is uranium enrichment, and could potentially create enough of the material for a nuclear bomb within a week’s time.
In recent months, the Biden administration has attempted to rein in Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah and other terror groups, likely due to concerns of the war escalating before the November presidential elections in the U.S.
Analysts have noted that Washington appears to have waning influence on Jerusalem, as decisions such as the assassination of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah were made without the U.S. being informed prior to the strike.