WarSclerotic

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameneni said Thursday that while Tehran doesn’t want an atomic bomb, “America could not do anything” to stop it if it did, just days after the UN’s nuclear watchdog did not explicitly report that Iran was implementing its nuclear-related commitments and said that its rate of uranium enrichment was increasing.

Khamenei made the comment during a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who came to Tehran as an interlocutor for US President Donald Trump to ease tensions between Washington and Tehran.

His visit may not have succeeded, however. Khamenei earlier was quoted as saying Iran “will in no way repeat” negotiations with the US amid tensions over its unraveling nuclear deal with world powers.

Khamenei’s official website quoted him as telling Abe: “I don’t regard Trump as deserving any exchange of messages and have no response for him and will give no response.”

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (R) and US President Donald Trump smile before playing a round of golf at Mobara Country Club in Chiba on May 26, 2019. (Kimimasa MAYAMA / POOL / AFP)

Abe is the first sitting Japanese prime minister to visit Tehran since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Earlier Thursday, Japan’s top government spokesman said Abe’s high-stakes trip was intended to help de-escalate tensions in the region — and not specifically mediate between Tehran and Washington. The remarks by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga to reporters were apparently meant to lower expectations amid uncertain prospects for Abe’s mission.

On Wednesday, after talks with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Abe warned of the possibility of “accidental conflict” that could be sparked amid heightened US-Iran tensions.

Iran has been locked in a bitter standoff with the United States since Trump withdrew from a 2015 nuclear deal in May last year.

Washington has since reimposed crippling sanctions — which have forced Tokyo to halt its once-substantial purchases of Iranian oil — and launched a military buildup in the Gulf amid reports that Iran was planning attacks on US forces in the region.

The Trump administration said its sanctions came over Iran’s ballistic missile program, support for Hezbollah and other activities.

The Abe-Khamenei meeting came amid reports Thursday that two oil tankers were attacked near the Strait of Hormuz.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, left, and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, attend a joint press conference after their meeting at the Saadabad Palace in Tehran, Iran, June 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

No one has claimed responsibility or explained how the tankers were attacked. However, the US previously blamed Iran for an attack last month on four oil tankers close to the nearby Emirati port of Fujairah.

A day earlier, Abe called for Iran to play a “constructive role” in bringing peace to the region.

“It is essential that Iran plays a constructive role in building solid peace and stability in the Middle East,” Abe told a joint news conference in Tehran with Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani.

“Today, tension is rising in the Middle East. Some experts point out that the conflict might be triggered accidentally,” said Abe. An armed clash “must be avoided by all means,” the premier stressed.

He added that Japan “wishes to play an utmost role in its capacity to ease the tension. This is the one single thought that brought me to Iran.”

Addressing the same news conference, Rouhani said if the US stopped pressuring Iran through sanctions, it would bring a “very positive change” to the Middle East and the world.

Iranians burn an effigy of US President Donald Trump during a parade marking al-Quds (Jerusalem) International Day in Tehran on May 31, 2019. (AFP)

“If there are some tensions, (their) roots stem from America’s economic war against Iran. Whenever it stops we will witness a very positive change in the region and the world,” Rouhani said. “We will not initiate a conflict in the region, even against the US, but if a war starts against us we will then give a crushing response,” the Iranian president added.

The Iranian president also underlined a convergence of views with his visitor on the issue of nuclear weapons, which he said “both of us are against.”

Abe, for his part, expressed his “deep respect to the fact that the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei reiterates the fatwa which says ‘nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction are against Islam.’”

Abe discussed “the situation in Iran” in a telephone call with Trump on Tuesday, a Japanese government spokesman said. The Japanese prime minister won Trump’s blessing for the mediation mission when the US president visited Tokyo last month.

“We believe it is extremely important that, at the leadership level, we call on Iran as a major regional power to ease tension, to adhere to the nuclear agreement and to play a constructive role for the region’s stability,” Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday said Israel was carrying out pre-emptive attacks to prevent its “enemy” from establishing military bases “in our vicinity,” in an apparent acknowledgment of a strike earlier in the day on alleged Hezbollah facilities across the border in Syria.

“We respond with attacks and force to every attack against us. But we are not only taking action after the fact, we are also denying the enemy capabilities before the fact. In a systematic and consistent way, we are working to prevent our enemy from establishing attack bases against us and in our vicinity,” Netanyahu said.

In the predawn hours of Wednesday morning, Syrian state media reported that Israel fired several missiles toward a mountain near the Golan border.

According to Syrian and Lebanese reports, the target of the strikes was infrastructure set up by the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group and its allies in recent months.

Israel has not officially commented on the alleged strike.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Knesset on May 27, 2019. (MENAHEM KAHANA / AFP)

Netanyahu made his remarks at a state memorial service for former president Ephraim Katzir, who died 10 years ago.

According to Syria’s official SANA news outlet, the strike targeted sites around Tel al-Harra, an area that Hezbollah has previously identified as being of “great strategic importance” because of the visibility it offers of the surrounding area.

There were no reports of injuries.

SANA also reported Israel had jammed Syrian air defense radars in the area, in what it called an act of electronic warfare.

Lebanese media reported earlier that Israel conducted reconnaissance flights around the Syrian-Lebanese border.

Hours after the alleged strike, a small drone penetrated Israeli airspace from Lebanon before turning back over the border, the Israeli military said.

Shortly after Syrian President Bashar Assad’s return to the Syrian Golan Heights, in July 2018, Hezbollah published a map identifying Tel al-Harra, the highest point in southern Syria, as \of “great strategic importance” because of the visibility it offers of the surrounding area.

Illustrative: Syrian troops flash the victory sign next to the Syrian flag in Tel al-Haara, the highest hill in the southwestern Daraa province, Syria, July 17, 2018. (SANA via AP)

In April, the Lebanese al-Modon news outlet reported that the terror group had been in talks with the Syrian military about establishing observation posts on Tel al-Harra.

While Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria in recent years, they have usually targeted bases linked with Iran. In the rare occasions that Israel has targeted villages and towns along the Golan Heights border, it has been after identifying Iranian and Hezbollah attempts to establish cells and infrastructure in the area.

Earlier this month, two rockets were fired from Syria toward Israel’s Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights. There were no reports of injuries or damage.

Israeli soldiers maneuver Merkava tanks in the Golan Heights on June 2, 2019. (Photo by JALAA MAREY / AFP)

Toward the start of the Syrian civil war, the Israeli military established a number of “red lines” that if violated would result in a retaliatory strike, including any attacks — intentional or otherwise — against Israel.

They also included Iranian efforts to establish a permanent military presence in Syria and attempts to transfer advanced munitions to the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terrorist group.

In recent years, Israel has acknowledged conducting hundreds of airstrikes in Syria in response to these “red line” violations.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.

For three and a half years, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency played a cat-and-mouse game with the Hezbollah terror group to stymie its efforts to establish explosives storehouses from Thailand to New York, an Israeli intelligence official confirmed this week.

The largest cache, containing some three tons of ammonium nitrate, a key ingredient for some types of explosives, was found at four locations in north London, sites raided by the Metropolitan Police in September 2015. Other caches planted by Hezbollah cells were discovered in Cyprus, Thailand and as-yet unnamed European countries, according to reports.

The Hezbollah plot to establish infrastructure in London in preparation for future attacks was revealed Sunday in the UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper.

That report, based on sources in Britain, the US and Cyprus, noted that a foreign intelligence agency, unnamed, had tipped off Britain’s MI5 and the Metropolitan Police about the explosives.

On Monday, an unnamed senior Israeli official told Israel’s Kan public broadcaster the warning had come from the Mossad.

On Wednesday, a report in the Yedioth Ahronoth daily expanded on the revelation, citing unnamed Israeli intelligence officials offering new details about the Israeli effort to stymie Hezbollah’s activities — which police in London, Cyprus and Thailand have concluded were ultimately directed at Israeli assets in those countries.

Illustrative: Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament in London. (Yossi Zamir/Flash90)

“Hezbollah is preparing for a situation in which it will decide to seek revenge, whether for something taking place between Israel and Lebanon or for an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, and has established a network of enormous caches of advanced explosive materials” for that purpose, Yedioth quoted an Israeli intelligence official as saying.

The Mossad learned in 2014 of the plan by Hezbollah’s Unit 910, responsible for the group’s foreign operations, to develop the ability to launch massive terror attacks at will around the world.

Mossad information enabled Thai authorities to nab a cell in the country in early 2015, followed in April of that year by the arrest of Hezbollah operative Hussein Abdullah in Cyprus after his cellar was found to contain a ton of ammonium nitrate.

The Israeli source told Yedioth that the effort by the Lebanese terror group involved “long-term planning for immense, game-changing terror attacks. Luckily, someone was in the right place at the right time to issue a warning, to pass on the information and to prevent the establishment of this infrastructure.”

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday the Islamic Republic does not seek war with the US, but will give “a crushing response” if it is attacked, as Japan’s premier visited Tehran in a bid to ease tensions between the rivals.

Rouhani made the comment as he stood alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who called for “more patience” between Iran and the US.

“There is possibility of an accidental conflict and a military conflict should be prevented at all costs,” Abe said.

He said he and the Iranian president had “bluntly discussed” the crisis.

“It is essential that Iran plays a constructive role in building solid peace and stability in the Middle East,” Abe told the joint news conference in Tehran with the Iranian leader, hours after Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels attacked a Saudi airport, wounding 26 people.

Abe’s trip to Tehran represents the highest-level effort yet to de-escalate tensions between the US and Iran as the country appears poised to break the 2015 nuclear deal it struck with world powers that America earlier abandoned.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (L) shakes hands with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during a welcoming ceremony at the Saadabad Palace in Iran’s capital Tehran on June 12, 2019. (AFP)

Iran is threatening to resume enriching uranium closer to weapons-grade level on July 7 if European allies fail to offer it new terms. While US President Donald Trump says he wants to talk to Tehran, the US has piled on sanctions that have seen Iran’s rial currency plummet along with its crucial oil exports.

The US also has sent an aircraft carrier and B-52 bombers to the region, along with hundreds more troops to back up the tens of thousands already deployed across the Middle East. The US blames Iran for a mysterious attack on oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, while Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen continue to launch coordinated drone attacks on Saudi Arabia.

Rouhani said an end to the “economic war” would result in “a very positive development in the region and the world.”

Abe’s plane landed at Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport on Wednesday afternoon where he was greeted by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. He immediately met Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and will see Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini on Thursday.

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (L) is greeted by Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (3rd R) at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport on June 12, 2019. (Ali Taghavi/ISNA/AFP)

Iran’s semi-official news agency reported that dozens of hard-line students gathered outside of the airport to protest Abe’s efforts to calm tensions.

Protesters said “the efforts by Japan’s prime minister for mediating between Iran and the US is useless, and if this is the goal of the trip, it will have no achievement,” the Fars news agency reported.

Students held placards, written in Farsi and Japanese, mocking Abe as “Japan’s representative or America’s ambassador.”

A hard-line newspaper also criticized Abe’s visit by printing an image showing the mushroom cloud of a nuclear blast on its front page: “How Can You Trust A War Criminal, Mr. Abe?” This appeared to refer to America dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

In this July 2, 2012 file photo, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboat maneuvers in the Persian Gulf while an oil tanker is seen in background. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi, File)

Abe landed just hours after the attack in Abha. The Yemeni rebels, known as Houthis, said they launched a cruise missile at the Saudi airport while the kingdom said 26 people were hurt.

Though there were no fatalities, it was the largest number of civilians to be injured in Saudi Arabia as a result of an attack by the rebels since the start of the Saudi-led war in Yemen more than four years ago.

The rebels’ Al-Masirah satellite news channel said the missile hit its intended target, halting air traffic at the airport in the town of Abha in the kingdom’s southwest, some 165 kilometers (100 miles) from the Saudi-Yemen border.

The war in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, has killed tens of thousands of civilians, with most of the deaths blamed on Saudi-led coalition airstrikes, and has pushed Yemen to the brink of famine.