DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Bracing itself for a retaliatory strike for last week’s ballistic missile attackIran has been urging its Arab neighbors not to allow Israel to use their airspace as part of any potential attack, two diplomats from Gulf nations told NBC News Friday.
Israel has vowed to respond to the strikes and while the nature and timing of the attack remain unclear, Iran warned countries that do help Israel in any way could potentially become part of a war, one of the diplomats said. Both asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the sensitive issue.
“The Gulf Cooperation Council is not interested in being caught in a crossfire,” one of the diplomats said. “Our focus has been on de-escalation.”
Many Arab nations such as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates host US bases and oil instillations vital to the world economy and the sentiment expressed by Iran is raising fears in the region that these could potentially become targets.
But the second diplomat added that it was unlikely that any Arab nation would agree to allow their airspace to be used by the Israelis for a strike on Iran.
Both diplomats spoke after an intense diplomatic push by Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian and Abbas Araghchi, his foreign minister, to shore up support among their Gulf neighbors and persuade them to use their influence in Washington to temper an Israeli attack.
On his whistlestop tour Araghchi traveled to Qatar and his country’s main regional rival, Saudi Arabiawhere he held discussions with the kingdom’s leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Pezeshkian is also set to meet with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of an international forum in Turkmenistan’s capital Ashgabat to discuss the situation in the Middle East, the Kremlin said Friday.
Ahead of their meeting Pezeshkian, who is widely thought of as relatively moderate, told Russian state TV that Israel should “stop killing innocent people” and that its actions in the Middle East were backed by the United States and the European Union.
Israel has promised Iran will pay after it launched a barrage of around 200 missiles last week, despite its military saying it shot most of them down and there being only one known fatality — 38-year-old Sameh Khadr Hassan Al-Asali, a Palestinian man who was hit by shrapnel in the occupied West Bank.
Tehran said it targeted Israel in retaliation for the killings of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallahas well as an April attack on Iran’s consulate in Syria’s capital Damascus that killed two of its generals.
Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran after he attended Pezeshkian’s inauguration ceremony in July while Nasrallah was killed by an Israeli airstrike. His death came days after several Hezbollah leaders were killed by exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, an attack which Israel was widely believed to have been behind.
Both militant groups are backed by Tehran and Pezeshkian has portrayed Iran as “exercising restraint” because it waited for two months after Haniyeh’s death before launching the attack on Israel.
The timing and nature of Israel’s response remains unclear. After talks between President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Earlier this week, a White House readout of the call said they “agreed to remain in close contact over the coming days.”
But on Wednesday, Yoav Gallant, Netanyahu’s defense minister, said Israel’s response would be “deadly, precise and above all surprising.”
While some in Israel and beyond are encouraging the country to use this opportunity to launch an ambitious and unprecedented strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Biden has previously said he would not support such an action.
Brig. Gen. Rasoul Sanaei-Rad, a senior adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameneiwas also quoted by the state-run Fars news agency on Wednesday as saying that striking nuclear sites would “cross regional and global red lines.”
Biden has also cautioned Israel against striking Iranian oil facilities and Gulf states, worried about their own oil sites coming under attack, have been lobbying Washington to prevent such a move.
Helping to fuel those fears, Abu al-Askari, the military spokesman for Kataib Hezbollah, a powerful Shiite paramilitary group based in Iraq, said in a statement on Telegram that “the world will lose 12 million barrels of oil per day,” if Iran what targeted. He also threatened to target “American bases, camps and interests in Iraq and the region.”
The Iran-backed militia was suspected of being behind a drone strike on a US base in northeast Jordan known as Tower 22, killing three US troops and injuring more than 30 others.
However, Matthew Savill is the Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, a London based think tank, said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if Israel “ignored Syrian and Iraqi protests though, and fly through.” The alternative was “a very long route around, down the Red Sea and up,” he added.
“It’s difficult to know how much they are trying to get the Iranians second-guessing themselves and tied-up in counter-intelligence knots,” he said, adding that it was generally assessed that a strike on Iran’s deepest nuclear facilities would “require large weapons that can only be dropped from US bombers.”
Elsewhere, in both Gaza and Lebanon people were counting the cost of Israeli strikes. At least 22 people were killed and 117 injured by overnight attacks on the Lebanese capital Beirut, according to the country’s health ministry. NBC News has reached out to the Israel Defense Forces for comment but has not received a response.
In Gaza, Palestinian authorities said at least 28 people had been killed and dozens more wounded by an airstrike on a school-turned-shelter in the city of Deir el-Balah. The IDF said it was being used as a terrorism command center.
