Iran to arm West Bank Palestinians for new Eastern Front to “efface”Israel
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report August 18, 2015
Al Qods commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani, acting on the orders of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, this week set up a new Iranian command to fight Israel, debkafile reports exclusively from its military and intelligence sources.
It has been dubbed the Eastern Command of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.The Al Qods Brigades, which are the external terrorist arm of the Guards, are organized according to sectors, with commands for Hizballah, the Palestinians, Syria, Iraq and the Gulf.
Their newest sector is the Eastern Command which, our sources report has been assigned as its first task to start handing out weapons, including missiles, to any Palestinian West Bank group willing to receive them. Tehran’s object is to transform the West Bank into a territory hostile to Israel on the model of southern Lebanon which is ruled by the armed Hizballah and the Gaza Strip under the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.
In the first week of August, Tehran published a book of 416 pages written by Ali Khamenei entitled “Palestine.” The cover image was labeled “The flagbearer of Jihad to liberate Jerusalem.”
The volume was released to Western sources, who reported that the most constantly recurring phrases in the text in relation to Israel are “nabudi” – meaning annihilation; imha – meaning disappearing or fading out; and “zaval” meaning effacement.
Khamenei asserts that Israel must be destroyed because it captured Islam’s third most sacred city and is the foremost ally of “Big Satan” – America.
The Iranian leader goes into detail about exactly how Israel should be annihilated – not by “classical wars” or “massacres of the Jews” but by means of a “long period of low-intensity warfare designed to make life impossible for a majority of Israeli Jews.”
When he visited Beirut on Aug. 12, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Zavad Zarif said it was necessary after the nuclear deal, to “confront the challenges of the region, the most important of which is the Zionist and extremist regime.”
Members of the Obama administration wave away these disclosures of Iranian intent as no more than letting off steam to pacify the hard-line opponents of the nuclear deal – US Secretary of State John Kerry said on July 24: “I also told them that their chants of Death to American and so forth are neither helpful and they’re pretty stupid.”
But in Iran, the supreme leader’s words are treated as decrees demanding obedience. Indeed, at the first conference of the new Eastern Command, Gen. Soleimani read out passages from Khamenei’s book and told the officers that they were under orders to carry those decrees out to the letter.
Attesting to the seriousness of Iran’s intent, Jmail Majdalani, PLO executive committee member and personal representative of Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, has arrived in Tehran. He is there to arrange his boss’s first visit in many years to the Iranian capital.
