Israel will not win against Hamas and Hezbollah, says Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in rare Friday sermon

In a first Friday sermon in five years, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei pledged to defeat Israel addressing a massive gathering at a mosque in Tehran, media reports said.

Speaking in front of ten of thousands of supporters, Khamenei called the missile strikes on Israel a “public service”.

Israel will not win against Hamas and Hezbollah, said Khemenei in his address.

The supreme leader of Iran also lauded Hassan Nasrallah, the chief of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut last week.

Khamenei said Nasrallah’s death won’t go in vain urging all Muslims to back Lebanon in defeating Israel.

“The enemy of the Iranian nation is the same as the enemy of the Iraqi nation, the same as the enemy of the Lebanese nation, the same as the enemy of the Egyptian nation; the enemy of all of us is one,” he said.

Besides promising revenge, the supreme leader called Israel a “tool” of the United States which he says is aiming to take control of the region.

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday warned that Iran made “a big mistake” by firing 181 missiles towards Israel.

The attack came amid Israeli strikes on Lebanon to target Hezbollah, which saw the execution of the militant outfit’s commander Hassan Nasrallah, and a top official from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

At a security cabinet meeting in a secure bunker near Jerusalem in the aftermath of the attack, Netanyahu warned that Tehran had made a ‘big mistake tonight’ and vowed that ‘it will pay for it’, reported The Times of Israel.

The strike on Israel had “failed”, he said, and was “thwarted thanks to Israel’s air defence system, which is the most advanced in the world.”