Iran’s state TV says a visiting delegation from the Palestinian terror group Hamas has met with the country’s supreme leader.
The TV report on Monday says Ayatollah Ali Khamenei held talks with Hamas’s deputy chief, Saleh al-Arouri, who is heading the delegation.
The Hamas delegation also meets with Kamal Kharrazi, an adviser to Khamenei.
The Iranian official news agency IRNA says al-Arouri’s visit to Tehran follows a visit by senior Iranian parliamentary official Hossein Amir-Abdollahian to Lebanon last week.
Khamenei tells the Hamas officials that supporting the Palestinians “is an ideological and religious matter” and strongly condemns the US peace plan, which he says the Palestinians have “precise missiles” to resist.
“The dangerous conspiracy of the ‘Deal of the Century’ is aimed at destroying the Palestinian identity among the Palestinian public and youth,” an English statement on his website quotes him saying.
“Confronting the Deal of the Century requires promotional, cultural, and intellectual efforts and the other method is to make the Palestinians feel advancement. Today Palestinians are equipped with precise missiles rather than stones and this means the feeling of advancement,” Khamenei adds.
He also says “the return of this holy land to the World of Islam is not a strange and unattainable matter” and calls Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s goal of praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount “an absolutely practical and achievable aspiration for us.”
Iran backs both Hamas and the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah.
Iran and Hamas do not recognize Israel and have both called for its destruction.
