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Iran threatens: If US attacks, we’ll wipe out Israel in half hour

In a television interview, senior official Mojtaba Zonnour gives Israel “half an hour” of life if America hits Iran.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

In a local television interview Sunday, a senior Iranian lawmaker threatened that Israel will not survive if the United States attacks his country.

Speaking on Al-Alam TV,  Mojtaba Zonnour, chairman of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of the Iranian parliament, said, “If America attacks us, Israel will survive for less than half an hour.”

The hardline cleric, who until 2019 also served as chairman of Iran’s Nuclear Subcommittee, spoke mainly about the U.S. threat to Iran amidst the rising tensions between the two adversaries.

Zonnour claimed that 36 American bases in the region are under Iran’s surveillance, all within reach of its missiles. This includes the “closest military base” in Bahrain, which serves the American Fifth Fleet, he said, as well as even the “most remote” one on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

“Today, we have intelligence hegemony,” he noted, according to a translation by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute. “We detect very quickly all the changes in the American bases in the region.”

If the Americans “think of attacking us,” the Iranian regime will sink the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carrier that is currently patrolling the region, Zonnour said. “Its huge size only makes it easier for us to target…. We will sink [it] along with its 7,000 crew members,” he added with a smile.

According to the state-sanctioned Mehr news agency, the senior parliamentarian scoffed at reports that President Donald Trump had called off a strike on Iran after Tehran shot down an unmanned American drone in June.

“If they (the Americans) had predicted their attack would be successful, they would not have cancelled it and it would definitely have happened,” he stated, crediting Iran’s “deterrence” for the aborted strike.

The U.S. administration said that the attack was called off due to the potential loss of life it would cause. Instead, the Americans disabled Iranian missile launch systems via cyberattack in retaliation for the downing of its drone.