Iran general says Israel too vulnerable to attack

TEHRAN (AFP) — The head of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, General Mohammad Ali Jafari, said on Wednesday that Israel is too vulnerable to Iran's longer-range missiles to dare launch an attack.

"Our strategic assessment shows that if the Zionist regime took action, whether alone or with the United States, in minimal time all of its territory would be vulnerable because this country lacks strategic depth and lies within the range of Iranian missiles," the Mehr news agency quoted him as saying.

"Iran's ballistic capabilities are such that the Zionist regime, with all the means at its disposal, has no way of countering them," the general added.

In recent months, several Israeli politicians have talked of the possibility of a pre-emptive military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities to avoid any possibility of Tehran acquiring an atomic weapon.

Iran has responded by threatening retaliatory strikes with its Shahab-3 missiles which have a nominal range of 2,000 kilometres (1,250 miles) -- enough to reach Israel.

"In the event of an attack against against Iran, the Israelis know that with the capabilities that the Islamic world and the Shiite world have in the region, they will suffer deadly strikes," Jafari said, alluding to the Shiite militant group Hezbollah across Israel's northern border with Lebanon.

He said an attack against Iran could come only from the United States and warned that in that event "our riposte will be swift, tough and unimaginable".

He said that the presence of US forces all around Iran's borders, in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf, made them too vulnerable to reprisal attacks.