Iran’s Khamenei says small Gaza brought US-backed Israel ‘to its knees’
Tehran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi mocks Trump for suggesting Gazans be relocated to other countries, advises sending Israelis to Greenland instead

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Tuesday that Gaza had brought Israel “to its knees,” in a reference to the recent ceasefire in the Palestinian territory.
The ceasefire and hostage-release deal between Iran’s arch-enemy Israel and the Tehran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas went into effect just over a week ago, aiming to put an end to more than 15 months of war started by Hamas.
“The small, limited Gaza brought the Zionist regime, armed to the teeth and fully supported by America, to its knees,” Khamenei said during a meeting with officials in Tehran.
The war in Gaza opened on October 7, 2023, when Hamas led thousands of terrorists in an invasion of southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Terrorists also took 251 hostages, 87 of whom remain in Gaza, including dozens Israel says are dead.
Under the terms of the complex, six-week ceasefire, Hamas is to release the hostages in return for an Israeli withdrawal from much of Gaza and Israel setting free thousands of Palestinian security prisoners it has imprisoned, including hundreds convicted of deadly terror attacks.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi meanwhile appeared to mock US President Donald Trump’s plan to relocate Palestinians, saying instead that Israelis should be sent to Greenland to resolve the issue.
“Instead of Palestinians, try to expel Israelis, take them to Greenland, killing two birds with one stone,” he said, in an English-language interview with Sky News that was posted on his official Telegram channel.
“They can resolve the problem of Greenland and the Israelis, it would be a good place for them,” he added.

Trump on Monday expressed his desire to move Palestinians from Gaza to “safer” locations such as Egypt or Jordan.
The US president has also for years touted a purported plan to take over the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland, telling reporters on Saturday he believed the United States would “get Greenland.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baqaei, had also criticized the idea of moving Palestinians out of Gaza.
“Political coercion and demographic manipulations will not be able to force the Palestinians to migrate,” Baqaei said in a post on X, adding that Gaza is the Palestinians’ “homeland and they’ve paid (an) extremely high price to remain there.”
Sky News also asked Araghchi about the setbacks Iran’s close allies have suffered during the Gaza war, including Israel’s battering of Lebanese terror group Hezbollah which began attacking Israel the day after the Hamas attack, and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.
At the suggestion that Iran’s regional strategy had failed, Araghchi played down the significance cautiously saying, “I don’t think so, these things happen in the world.”
He then switched to Persian, saying: “The resistance has been rendered some serious blows. Hamas and Hezbollah have been damaged. But at the same time, they are rebuilding themselves.”

During the interview, Araghchi spoke of the possibility that Israel would carry out a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent the Islamic Republic from producing a nuclear weapon.
“This is not a real threat because they know our capabilities to respond,” he said apparently referring to the two massive ballistic missile and drone attacks that Iran launched on Israel over the past year in a spillover from the wars against Hamas and Hezbollah.
“We have made it clear that any attack on our nuclear facilities would be faced with an immediate and decisive response,” he said. “But I don’t think they [Israeli] will do that crazy thing. This is really crazy. And this would turn the whole region into a very bad disaster.”
Both of the Iranian barrages were largely thwarted by Israel’s air defense systems in cooperation with the US and its allies in the area. Israel responded to each of the attacks with airstrikes, the second of which was said to have destroyed much of Iran’s air defense capabilities as well as some rocket and drone manufacturing sites.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 46,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters.
Israel says it has killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7. Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools and mosques.

Eighty-seven of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 34 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Hamas has so far released seven hostages during the ceasefire that began this month. The terror group released 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November 2023, and four hostages were released before that.
Eight hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 40 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the Israeli military as they tried to escape their captors.
Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the body of an IDF soldier who was killed in 2014. The body of another IDF soldier, also killed in 2014, was recovered from Gaza this month.