Report: US warned Iran it won’t be able to restrain Israel if it attacks again

The US has reportedly warned Iran in recent days against launching another attack on Israel, adding that Washington will not be able to restrain Israel if it attacks again, the Axios news site reports, citing a US official and a former Israeli official.

“We told the Iranians: We won’t be able to hold Israel back, and we won’t be able to make sure that the next attack will be calibrated and targeted as the previous one,” the US official is quoted as saying.

The report quotes the official as saying the message was conveyed directly to the Iranians, though the Israeli source says a message was passed to Tehran via Swiss intermediaries.

There is no response from Washington or Tehran to the report, which comes hours after Iran’s supreme leader threatened Israel and the US with “a crushing response” over attacks on Iran and its allies.

Iranian officials are increasingly threatening to launch yet another strike against Israel after its October 26 attack on the Islamic Republic that targeted military bases and facilities and that Iran said killed at least five people.

Israel’s retaliatory strikes on Iranian military facilities came weeks after the October 1 attack, in which Iran launched 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, sending most of the population rushing to bomb shelters and safe rooms, causing relatively minor damage to military bases and some residential areas, and killing a Palestinian man in the West Bank.