Iran will respond to any existential threat “with all means that it has”, a senior government official said on Tuesday, suggesting that any future US or Israeli strike on the country could elicit a more damaging counter-attack.
“The moment that Iran feels that there is an existential threat to Iran, it will definitely will be a different Iran, and will not act in a measured way, will not act predictably,” Deputy Foreign Minister Saeed Khatibzadeh said at a panel in Tehran. “Iran would respond with all means that it has and in a very different manner that nobody can imagine.”
The US attacked three Iranian nuclear sites during a 12-day war between Iran and Israel in June, prompting Iran to launch missiles at a US military base in Qatar in response. The move, followed by a Doha-brokered ceasefire, did not cause any damage and most of the missiles were shot down by Qatar’s air defences.
Iranian officials have framed their attack on Doha as a measured response to the US strikes, from which the full extent of damage has not yet been determined.
The decision to attack the US base at Al Udeid in Qatar, the largest American military base in the Middle East and home to about 10,000 US troops, was meant to send a signal of readiness to the US, Mr Khatibzadeh added.
“They may have expected that Iran respond in Iraq or somewhere else,” he said, referring to the possibility of striking US service personnel stationed at bases in Iraq. The choice of Al Udeid was, “just to send this very signal – we are ready”.
Iran suspended co-operation with the UN’s atomic energy watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), after the war, amid anger in Tehran about the organisation’s perceived complicity in Israel’s attacks on its nuclear sites.
“There is a resolution passed by our parliament, and it's obligatory,” Mr Khatibzadeh said. “But there are provisions based on which Iran’s Supreme National Security Council can regulate our relations with the IAEA, and I think that within that framework, Iran will continue its co-operation, of course, within the framework of those provisions regarding the NPT.”
At the moment, leaving the Non-Proliferation Treaty, an international pact aiming to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, is not on the table, he added.
“We are signatories to the NPT. So there is not, for now, any debate inside Iran regarding the NPT.”
In the panel, hosted by the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s Institute of International and Political Studies think tank, Iranian officials and analysts described how they believed Israel had not achieved its strategic aims of destroying threats from Iran, either through toppling supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei through a popular protest, or by obliterating missile launch sites and nuclear sites.
Mohammad Kazem Sajjadpour, Iran's former ambassador to the UN, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had turned his attention to Iran to “deflect” from the continuing war in Gaza.
“Exactly at the same time that it was bombing Iran, I think they killed maybe more Palestinians in Gaza in the same time,” he said. “So the issue is just deflecting a crisis which is very structural, not solvable – not due to Palestinians, due to the mentalities of these people like Netanyahu.”
There remain serious questions over the durability of the current ceasefire between Israel and Iran, which came into effect overnight following Iran’s attack on Al Udeid.
One scenario is that both Iran and Israel were exhausted after 12 days of war, which killed up to 1,000 people in Iran and at least 29 in Israel, and were looking for a way out. US President Donald Trump, too, seeing the possibility for further escalation, wanted an off-ramp from another possible regional war for which he did not want to be blamed, according to Naser Hadian, a political-science professor at Tehran University.
“President Trump soon understood that the next round of Iranian attacks could basically bring a regional war into reality, and he didn't want it” he told the panel. “He didn't want to be blamed for the killing of many Americans and also rising oil prices and a region-wide war. So that's why he quickly went for a ceasefire.”
The Israelis, Mr Hadian said, saw that the costs of Iran’s attacks on the country “were high”, and were looking for “a negotiated solution to achieve the rest of their objectives”.
All sides looking for a non-military solution could reopen a diplomatic route to avoid more conflict in the region, he said.
“If we think that both sides are exhausted and the costs outweigh the benefits, then we are going to go for a genuine, real diplomacy to negotiate a solution which is acceptable for both sides, then there is a lot of room for manoeuvring,” Mr Hadian said.
At the least, such a pathway would involve a written and negotiated ceasefire, solidifying the current pause in the fighting. At a maximum, it could even stretch to non-aggression pacts between Iran, Israel and the US, Mr Hadian said.
“So the minimum is going to be a ceasefire,” he said. “The maximum would be a non-aggression pact between the Iranians and Israelis negotiated through the Americans and endorsed by the Americans, and also a non-aggression pact with the Americans themselves, too.”
However, a second scenario also exists that leaves the door open for future military action after a pause.
“If we accept the second hypothesis, we have to wait for the war. It's going to come sooner or later,” Mr Hadian said. “They think they have an unfinished job, they have to finish it, both sides.”
Iranian officials accuse Israel of torpedoing talks that were continuing between the US and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear programme by launching attacks on June 13. President Masoud Pezeshkian said this week that his country was ready to hold talks over the future of its nuclear programme, but Iranian officials have not confirmed participating in any new negotiations.
One major concern of western powers is the fate of Iran’s supply of highly enriched uranium, which is sufficient to build several nuclear weapons in a matter of weeks. Iran denies it is seeking an atom bomb and says its enrichment is purely for peaceful scientific and agricultural purposes.
In five previous rounds of US-Iran talks held since April, the issue of the enriched uranium was discussed extensively and there were “many novel ideas” about its handling, Mr Khatibzadeh said.
However, serious effort will be required to restore any rapport built up between the delegations during those talks, he said.
“Let me also be clear on this point, that what United States did was an unforgivable and unforgettable grave aggression on Iran,” Mr Khatibzadeh said.
