CNN’s Christiane Amanpour Insists Iran Doesn’t Want Conflict to ‘Escalate’ As Its Missiles Rain Down on Israel
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour insisted that Iran doesn’t want the conflict between itself and Israel to “escalate” as its missiles rained down on Israel on Tuesday.
As ballistic missiles launched by Iran at Israel careened toward Israel on Tuesday afternoon in the United States, evening in Israel, anchor Dana Bash turned to Amanpour for analysis.
“It’s incredibly important to be absolutely precise about what’s going on. So far, there is no evidence that anything has landed, that it is being intercepted according to our correspondents on the ground. And also, the United States and Israel said that that they assessed that the targets would be three Israeli air bases, and an intelligence base, again as our correspondents have said, that’s very important to keep in mind,” she began before articulating her understanding of Iran’s view of the conflict:
As for Iran and now the Lebanese prime minister is very concerned that there will somehow be an attempt, whether it is to come to the rescue of Israel or whether Israel tries to get the U.S. in, but that the U.S. may end up joining this escalation in the Middle East — the foreign minister said that. The Iranian foreign minister told me in New York during the United Nations that they were showing and this is again before Friday’s assassination, that they were showing restraint and that Hezbollah was showing restraint as well, and that it wanted, you know, to de-escalate all of this. That was the word also from the podium at the United Nations by the Iranian president.
And they were saying that they are being entrapped and they’re trying to resist the the notion of being trapped into this war. So then comes the assassination of their client, Hassan Nasrallah. Now, Hezbollah is not there, you know, Iran is not there to protect Hezbollah. It’s the opposite. Hezbollah is meant to be the frontline troops of Iran. So this response from Iran is more likely because it feels it has been left no choice.
“There’s been a lot of internal divisions inside Iran about how best to respond to what happened with the assassination of Nasrallah. So that is essentially what seems to be going on right now in terms of the big picture,” she continued.
“Nobody, nobody, not the Lebanese nor the Iranians want this to escalate even further. Iran does not want an Israeli or a U.S. war against it. It is unlikely to be able to resist that, it does not want it. So we are going to see whether this is targeted and how much actual damage beyond what Israel believes other targets, is actually done. And I think that is what’s going to determine potentially the next steps like it did last time,” insisted Amanpour.
Hezbollah is labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. and many other countries as it explicitly targets civilians, has carried out bombings of both the American embassy and barracks in Lebanon, and frequently fires rockets at Israeli cities from behind the Lebanese border.
Its late leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly called for Israel’s destruction and referred to Israel as “the state of the grandsons of apes and pigs — the Zionist Jews” and submitted that “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew.”
Watch above via CNN.
