JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel accused arch-enemies Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah of being behind twin bomb attacks that targeted Israeli embassy staff in India and Georgia yesterday, wounding four people.
Tehran denied involvement in the attacks, which amplified tensions between two countries already at loggerheads over Iran’s nuclear programme, and accused Israel of carrying out the attacks itself. Hezbollah made no comment.
In the Indian capital New Delhi, a bomb wrecked a car taking an Israeli embassy official to pick up her children from school, police said. The woman needed surgery to remove shrapnel but her life was not in danger.
Her driver and two passers-by suffered lesser injuries.
Israeli officials said an attempt to bomb an embassy car in the Georgian capital Tbilisi failed, and the device was defused. Israel had put its foreign missions on high alert ahead of the fourth anniversary this past Sunday of the assassination in Syria of the military mastermind of Hezbollah, Imad Moughniyeh – an attack widely assumed to be the work of Israeli agents.
Israel is believed to be locked in a wider covert war with Iran, whose nuclear programme has been beset by apparent sabotage, including the unclaimed killings of several Iranian nuclear scientists, most recently in January. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed both Iran and Hezbollah, accusing them of responsibility for a string of recent attempted attacks on Israeli interests in countries as far apart as Thailand and Azerbaijan.
“Iran and its proxy Hezbollah are behind each of these attacks,” said Netanyahu, who dismisses Iran denials that it is trying to develop a nuclear weapon. “We will continue to take strong and systematic, yet patient, action against the international terrorism that originates in Iran.”
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast rejected Netanyahu’s accusation, saying it was Israel that had carried out the attacks as part of its psychological warfare against Iran.
