Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei defended Iran’s missile attack on Israel as “legal and legitimate.”
“The operation of our armed forces a few nights ago was totally legal and legitimate,” he said during a rare Friday prayer sermon.
Khamenei had a rifle by his side during his address to worshippers in Tehran days after Iran’s missile attack on Israel.
Khamenei delivered the sermon — his first in nearly five years – to thousands of worshippers carrying portraits of slain leaders of Iran’s “axis of resistance” against Israel and the United States.
The supreme leader, who wields the highest authority in Iran, led Muslims in prayer at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla mosque in central Tehran, his official website said.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, who answer to Khamenei, said Tuesday’s barrages of some 200 missiles were in retaliation for Israel’s killing of Nasrallah alongside Guards commander Abbas Nilforoushan in a late September strike on Beirut, and of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July.
Khamenei last led Friday prayers in January 2020 after Iran fired missiles at a US army base in Iraq, in response to a strike that killed revered Revolutionary Guards commander Qasem Soleimani.
In Tehran on Thursday, crowds waving Hezbollah and Iran flags gathered outside the former US embassy building in Tehran to denounce Israeli “crimes” in the Gaza Strip and in Lebanon, Iranian media reported.
