The second-in-command of the elite Revolutionary Guard Corps fired off a chilling threat, saying Iran will wipe Israel off the map if it starts a war, and the Israelis won’t even be able to bury their dead.

“Our strategy is [to wipe] Israel [off] the world’s political geography and Israel seems to be approaching this reality by its mischiefs,” Brigadier General Hossein Salami told reporters in Tehran, as cited by semi-official Fars news agency. Salami was asked to comment on Israeli airstrikes in Syria.

If Israel “does anything that leads to a new war,” the general warned, “certainly it will be [the kind of war] that will result in their elimination, and the occupied territories will be retaken.”

An Iranian counteroffensive will be so powerful that the “Israelis won’t even have a cemetery in Palestine to bury their corpses,” Salami said.

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The warning came a week after the Israeli Air Force launched massive strikes against Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces stationed in Syria. Syrian air defenses repelled most of the Israeli missiles with little damage reported on the ground.

Israel has routinely bombed targets inside Syria that it claims belong to Iran to prevent Iranian forces from gaining a foothold in the country. Recently, Israel’s top military brass acknowledged that “thousands of targets” were hit in “near-daily” strikes, with 2,000 bombs dropped on Iranian targets in 2018 alone.

Iran and Israel have treated each other as major political and ideological opponents for decades. Tel Aviv believes Tehran’s ultimate goal is to annihilate the Jewish state, while Iranian leaders fear an Israeli-led military action against their own country.

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In the past, both countries have traded veiled threats and open insults. Last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted the collapse of the regime in Tehran and claimed the IDF is the only army fighting Iran.

Top officials in Iran haven’t minced words either. Earlier this month, Brigadier General Aziz Nasirzadeh, the commander of the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF), claimed that they “are fully ready and impatient to confront the Zionist regime and eliminate it from the Earth.”

Praising Iran’s military capabilities, he added: “Our future generations are learning required know-how for the promised day to destroy Israel.”

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