Iran warns its neighbors not to help Israel attack
Oct. 11, 2024, 7:44 PM GMT+5
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Bracing itself for a retaliatory strike for last week’s ballistic missile attack, Iran has been urging its Arab neighbors not to allow Israel to use their airspace as part of any potential attack, two diplomats from Gulf nations told NBC News Friday.
Israel has vowed to respond to the strikes and while the nature and timing of the attack remain unclear, Iran warned countries that do help Israel in any way could potentially become part of a war, one of the diplomats said. Both asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the sensitive issue.
“The Gulf Cooperation Council is not interested in being caught in a crossfire,” one of the diplomats said. “Our focus has been on de-escalation.”
Many Arab nations such as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates host U.S. bases and oil instillations vital to the world economy and the sentiment expressed by Iran is raising fears in the region that these could potentially become targets.
But the second diplomat added that it was unlikely that any Arab nation would agree to allow their airspace to be used by the Israelis for a strike on Iran.
Both diplomats spoke after an intense diplomatic push by Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian and Abbas Araghchi, his foreign minister, to shore up support among their Gulf neighbors and persuade them to use their influence in Washington to temper an Israeli attack.
On his whistlestop tour Araghchi traveled to Qatar and his country's main regional rival, Saudi Arabia, where he held discussions with the kingdom’s leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Pezeshkian is also set to meet with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of an international forum in Turkmenistan’s capital Ashgabat to discuss the situation in the Middle East, the Kremlin said Friday.
Ahead of their meeting Pezeshkian, who is widely thought of as relatively moderate, told Russian state TV that Israel should “stop killing innocent people” and that its actions in the Middle East were backed by the United States and the European Union.
Israel has promised Iran will pay after it launched a barrage of around 200 missiles last week, despite its military saying it shot most of them down and there being only one known fatality — 38-year-old Sameh Khadr Hassan Al-Asali, a Palestinian man who was hit by shrapnel in the occupied West Bank.
Tehran said it targeted Israel in retaliation for the killings of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, as well as an April attack on Iran's consulate in Syria's capital Damascus that killed two of its generals.
Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran after he attended Pezeshkian’s inauguration ceremony in July while Nasrallah was killed by an Israeli airstrike. His death came days after several Hezbollah leaders were killed by exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, an attack which Israel was widely believed to have been behind.
Both militant groups are backed by Tehran and Pezeshkian has portrayed Iran as “exercising restraint” because it waited for two months after Haniyeh's death before launching the attack on Israel.