“Israel did not achieve any of its goals of occupying Gaza and eliminating the resistance,” he said during an interview in Tehran on Wednesday with representatives of five Arabic-language television networks, namely Lebanon's al-Manar, Iraq's al-Etejah TV, and the Palestinian al-Aqsa TV and Palestine Today as well as Yemen's al-Masirah.
Still referring to the war waged by the Israeli regime, Raisi said, “What the Zionist regime has done shows that it has grown desperate in the face of the Palestinian resistance.”
The regime launched the war on October 7 following an operation, dubbed al-Aqsa Storm, by the territory's resistance groups, which killed some 1,200 Israeli settlers and military forces and led to the captivity of hundreds more.
Raisi described the operation as the Palestinian people's “legitimate defense of their right,” which was prompted by their growing “impatient with (the Israeli regime's) incessant oppression.”
“A nation, whose home is usurped, whose family members are imprisoned and martyred, and whose farms are destroyed, enjoys the right to legitimate self-defense” by whatever logical standard, the president said.
The Palestinian operation, Raisi added, inflicted "military, security, and intelligence defeat" upon the Israeli regime.
The president, meanwhile, pointed to the regime's killing of more than 14,500 Palestinians so far during the war, saying, “Killing of women and children does not translate into victory.”
The massacre of women and children "has created an unprecedented atmosphere of anti-Zionist hatred across the world," Raisi concluded, according to Press TV.