DUBAI, April 5. /TASS/. Enemy actions against Tehran will face retaliation, General Hossein Salami, commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said.

The general made the statement in an address on Jerusalem Day, which is being marked amid tensions stemming from Israel’s April 1 airstrike on the consular office of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, which killed 13 people.

"As our Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said, we will punish the Zionist regime. <...> We warn that no action by Iran’s enemies against the Islamic Republic’s system of government will be left without retaliation," Salami said, as cited by the Mehr news agency.

According to the IRGC commander-in-chief, after the Jewish state was founded, the US turned it into its "political springboard in the Muslim region," using it "as leverage to impose America’s criminal colonial policy." In his view, Israel "still exists only through US support." The general stressed that Israel had no way out of the conflict in the Gaza Strip but to surrender.

Attack on Iranian consulate in Syria

On April 1, the IRCG announced that seven Iranian military advisors had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on Tehran’s consulate in Damascus. General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and General Mohammad Hadi Haji-Rahimi were among those killed. According to Iran’s IRIB TV channel, Zahedi commanded the units of the IRGC Al-Quds Force in Lebanon and Syria. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Tehran would make Israel repent for the strike, while President Ebrahim Raisi vowed that the attack would not go unanswered. Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov slammed the attack as an act of aggression.

Israel has so far made no statements on responsibility for the airstrike. However, Israel Defense Forces Spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told CNN that, according to the Israeli military's data, the strike had not targeted Iran’s consulate but an IRGC military facility, which he claimed had only been disguised as a civilian building.