TEHRAN, Feb 18: Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on Monday predicted that Israel would be destroyed by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in the “near future”, the Fars news agency reported.

“In the near future, we will witness the destruction of Israel, the aggressor, this cancerous microbe Israel, at the able hands of the soldiers of the community of Hezbollah,” said the head of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Ali Jafari.

The comments by the head of Iran’s elite ideological force came in a condolence message to Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah after the murder last week in Damascus of a top commander of the group, Imad Mughnieh, the news agency said.

“With the martyrdom of this true Muslim, the intentions of all revolutionary and combatant Muslims, especially the comrades of this dear martyr, will without doubt become firmer against the Zionist regime,” Jafari said.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has already hailed Mughnieh as a “great” man and predicted his death will serve to increase resistance against Israel.

In a sign of Iran’s respect for Mughnieh, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki attended his funeral in the Shiite suburbs of Beirut on Thursday and gave an oration.

The Islamic republic has a longstanding policy of non-recognition of Israel but its rhetoric against the Jewish state has sharpened during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Iran insists its position is in no way anti-Semitic but anti-Zionist, pointing to the continued existence in the country of the largest Jewish community in the Middle East after Israel.

Mughnieh, who was killed in a car bombing in Damascus on Tuesday, was suspected of masterminding the abduction of western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s and the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires that killed 29 people.

The United States accuses Iran, along with its regional ally Syria, of arming and financing Hezbollah, as well as working to destabilise Lebanon in its current political crisis.—AFP