With Israeli society increasingly fractured over the country’s democratic character and future, Iran on Sunday mocked the Jewish state’s troubles while also joking at the expense of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his health problems.
“It is reported in the news that doctors have used a battery for the heart of the prime minister of the Zionist occupation regime,” the spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Nasser Kanaani, tweeted in Farsi, referring to the revelation that a pacemaker had been implanted in the premier following a potentially life-threatening cardiac event.
“But it is clear that the crisis in the heart of the Zionist regime is deeper than the crisis in the heart of its prime minister,” Kanaani added.
This was not the first time the Iranian Foreign Ministry has weighed in on the political crisis in Israel lately and implied that it may be a harbinger of the impending demise of the Jewish state.
In a tweet on July 14, Kanaani commented on clashes between protesters demonstrating against the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul and police: “For many years, the occupying and criminal Zionists tried to make their fake regime appear as the most democratic entity in the West Asian region.
“Now the mask has fallen off from the faces of the Zionist dictators, as they respond to the protesters with an iron fist. The leaders of the protesters have warned Netanyahu that Israel is on the brink of collapse,” Kanaani added.
In a tweet on July 16, Kanaani wrote: “The Western media empire, turning a blind eye to repression and violence against protesters, portrays these demonstrations as a symbol of false democracy in Israel.”
In another tweet the same day, Kanaani falsely alleged that the Israeli police had been repressing the demonstrations “using the most modern means of violence against the protesters and concealing the number of dead, injured and arrested by the security forces.”
IRNA, the official news agency of the Iranian regime, also commented on the current situation in Israel. In an article in English published on Sunday, the agency quoted unnamed “experts” falsely claiming that “the continued demonstrations in the occupied territories have turned into a protest against the very existence of the Zionist regime.”
Iran was recently accused by the United Nations of “chillingly” executing protesters following a fact-finding mission to probe the regime’s handling of large-scale demonstrations that rocked the country last year. The wave of protests was sparked by the death last September of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd who had been arrested for allegedly violating the strict dress rule for women based on Islam’s sharia law.
According to some human rights groups, at least 448 people were killed by Iranian security forces during the regime’s crackdown on the protests, while other sources estimate that as many as 5,000 may have been killed based on comparative data from the civil register.
In addition, Tehran is reported to have hanged at least 354 people in the first six months of 2023, with executions being carried out at a much higher pace than in 2022 to spread fear across society in the wake of the protests, according to rights groups.
Source: Times of Israel
