Anand Iran is not planning any retaliation against Israel after Friday (Apr 19) attacks, a top Iranian official was quoted by Reuters as saying.
“The foreign source of the incident has not been confirmed. We have not received any external attack, and the discussion leans more towards infiltration than attack,” the official said.
Earlier, Jerusalem Post reported its sources have confirmed that Israeli strikes hit military assets “almost right next door to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear site in Isfahan”.
“The message was unmistakable, ‘we chose not to hit your nuclear sites this time, but we could have done worse right here,’ the source reportedly told the Post.
Meanwhile, UN nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has confirmed that Iranian nuclear sites are safe and were not damaged in the attacks.
IAEA can confirm that there is no damage to #Iran’s nuclear sites,” the international body wrote on X.
However, Iran has tried to play down the scale of attacks, saying there was no missile attack. Iranian media reported that the explosion heard near Isfahan was the activation of an air defence system.
Iranian media IRNA later reported that the defences fired across several provinces. It also said that several drones had been shot down on Iranian territory.
However, it didn’t elaborate on what triggered the batteries to fire.
This is in contrast to what the US has confirmed: There has been an Israeli strike perhaps involving drones.
Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir came under fire Friday as he was accused of harming Israel’s strategy against Iran by suggesting his nation was behind Friday’s attack on Iran.
He had written one-word post on X that reportedly means “feeble” in Hebrew slang.
Officially, both the Israeli military and the government have maintained silence on the attack.
“Never before a minister has done such a heavy damage to the country’s security, its image, and its international status,” opposition leader Yair Lapid wrote on X. “In an unforgivable tweet of one word, Ben Gvir managed to sneer and shame Israel from Tehran to Washington.”
