Tehran
\nIran\u2019s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, delivering a rare Friday sermon in Arabic, defended this week\u2019s missile attack on Israel that deepened fears of a regional war and praised allies\u2019 defiance.
\nSpeaking in front of tens of thousands at a mosque in the capital Tehran, Khamenei said armed groups in the Middle East \u201cwill not back down\u201d even after a spate of Israeli killings of militant leaders.
\nIn his first public Friday sermon in nearly five years, Khamenei spoke in Arabic to discuss fighting against Israel by the Iran-aligned \u201caxis of resistance\u201d, including Lebanon\u2019s Hezbollah and Palestinian group Hamas.
\n\u201cThe resistance in the region will not back down with these martyrdoms, and will win,\u201d Khamenei told the crowd at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla mosque, where supporters carried portraits of slain Hezbollah and Hamas leaders.
\nHe hailed the groups\u2019 \u201cfierce defence\u201d against Israeli forces over the past year, since Hamas\u2019s October 7 attack sparked the war in the Gaza Strip that has since spread to Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East.
\nThe Tehran-backed militants were engaged in \u201clogical and legitimate\u201d action against Israel, Khamenei said, and \u201cno one has the right to criticise them.\u201d
\nKhamenei spoke with a rifle by his side, a common tradition in Iran for Shiite Muslim imams leading Friday prayers, meant to signal preparedness to face an enemy.
\nThe speech was preceded by a commemoration ceremony Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah who was killed in an Israeli strike on southern Beirut on September 27 alongside Revolutionary Guards commander Abbas Nilforoushan, dramatically escalating the conflict.
\nKhamenei\u2019s sermon took place days before the first anniversary of the Gaza war, and after Iran this week had fired barrages of some 200 missiles at Israel in retaliation for the killings of Nasrallah, Nilforoushan as well as Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July.
\n\u201cWhat our armed forces did was the minimum punishment for the crimes of the usurping Zionist regime,\u201d said Khamenei of the missile fire, Iran\u2019s second-ever direct attack on US-backed Israel.
\nThe Iranian leader charged that Israel was a \u201cmalicious regime\u201d which has \u201conly kept itself standing by the injection of American support\u201d.
\nIt \u201cwill not last long\u201d, he said.
\n\u201cThe Palestinians were right\u201d to launch the unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel, Khamenei said, calling it \u201ca logical and legal\u201d action.
\nIran has hailed the Hamas attack but denied any involvement.
\nTehran does not recognise Israel and has made support for the Palestinian cause a centrepiece of its foreign policy since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
\nKhamenei last led Friday prayers in January 2020 after Iran fired missiles at a US army base in Iraq, in response to a strike that killed revered Revolutionary Guards commander Qasem Soleimani.
\nHamas, Hezbollah and other armed groups in the Middle East are part of the Iran-aligned \u201caxis of resistance\u201d opposed to Israel and its ally the United States. In April Tehran had sent missiles and drones against Israel in retaliation for a deadly Israeli strike on Iran\u2019s consulate in Damascus. In both attacks, nearly all missiles were intercepted by Israel or its allies, according to Israeli authorities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tehran Iran\u2019s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, delivering a rare Friday sermon in Arabic, defended this week\u2019s missile attack on Israel that deepened fears of a regional war and praised allies\u2019 defiance. Speaking in front of tens of thousands at a mosque in the capital Tehran, Khamenei said armed groups in the Middle East \u201cwill …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":71177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71163"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71178,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71163\/revisions\/71178"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}