Defeated in Gaza, Israel can't repair myth of invincibility with barbarism in Lebanon: Pezeshkian

He was referring to the regime’s failure in the face of the Gaza-based resistance movement Hamas in the Palestinian territory and the escalation of the regime’s attacks against Lebanon since the onset of the war.

As part of the escalation, the regime carried out extensive airstrikes against southern and eastern Lebanon on Monday, killing at least 569 people, including 50 children and 94 women, and wounding 5,000 others.

The attacks came less than a week after the regime killed 38 people in an attack on a residential building in a southern suburb of Lebanon’s capital Beirut. A couple of days earlier, it had also detonated thousands of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkie radios across the country, killing at least 39 people and wounding 3,000 others.

Pezeshkian said, “The insane Israeli barbarism in Lebanon should be stopped before setting the region and the world on fire.”

“Naturally, the blind and terrorist crimes of the past days and the extensive aggression against Lebanon that shed the blood of thousands of innocent people will not remain unanswered,” he added.

“Those governments that stand in the way of cessation of this terrible catastrophe and still call themselves defenders of the human rights, have to bear the consequences [of these atrocities],” the president noted.

Pezeshkian, meanwhile, pointed to the regime’s killing of more than 41,000 Palestinians, mostly woman and children, during the course of the Gaza war that began on October 7.

“The people of the world have witnessed the nature of the Israeli regime throughout the past year. They have seen how the regime’s rulers perpetrate crimes,” he said.

The regime, though, refers to its “genocide, war crime, and state terrorism as ‘legitimate defense’ and identifies hospitals, kindergartens, and schools as ‘legitimate military targets,’” the president noted.

He also denounced branding of those who have been protesting the Israeli war across the world as “ant-Semites,” pledging that the Islamic Republic stands by the international protesters.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Pezeshkian addressed the issue of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, lambasting the Israeli regime and its supporters for trying to identify the Palestinians, “who have risen up [to claim the right] after seven decades of occupation and humiliation, as ‘terrorists.’”