Iran prepares 200-percent increase to defense budget
The Cradle, October 29, 2024 ─
The announcement comes days after Tehran said it thwarted an Israeli attack on military sites in Iran.
Iran has proposed plans to increase its military and defense budget for the coming year by 200 percent, a government spokesperson said just days after Israel’s attack on military sites in the Islamic Republic.
“The administration has taken various sectors into consideration in the budget bill that it has submitted to the Parliament for the next Iranian fiscal year. The cabinet has considered a 200 percent rise in the defense budget for the next year,” spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said on 29 October.
The spokeswoman also stressed that the recent Israeli attack on Iran was a violation of the country’s sovereignty and that Tehran reserves its right to respond in an appropriate manner.
“The Supreme National Security Council will determine the timing and manner of the Iranian response to the Israeli aggression,” she added. “Israel believes that it can strike at national unity in Iran through its measures, but it will thereby strengthen national unity and harmony among Iranians.”
Israel launched a missile and drone attack on Iranian military sites in the provinces of Tehran, Khuzestan, and Ilam during the early hours of 26 October, killing four Iranian soldiers. Iranian air defenses managed to intercept many of the incoming projectiles and thwart the majority of the strikes, according to officials. It said limited damage was being investigated in some sites.
Tel Aviv claimed to have struck air defense and missile production sites. According to the Israeli army’s Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, Israel launched a “restrained” attack and can “do much more.”
The attack was a response to Tehran’s launching of hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel in early October, which targeted several Israeli military bases in response to the assassination of resistance leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Hassan Nasrallah.
Israel’s attack “has not had the slightest effect on Iran’s military power,” the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Akbar Ahmadian, said on 28 October, adding that Iranian military and defense capabilities remain “intact.”
Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Major General Hossein Salami, said on Monday that Israel will have to await the “bitter and unimaginable consequences” of its attack on Iran.
“We do not seek war, but we will defend our country and the rights of our people. We will give a proportionate response to the aggression by the Zionist regime,” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in a cabinet meeting on 27 October.
Pezeshkian said days before the attack, while speaking in parliament on 22 October that strengthening defense was one of the “basic principles” prioritized in the country’s budget bill.