International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, 2 Oct 2008

According to Iranian state television, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Wednesday that Iran will maintian its support for the Hamas regime in Gaza and that Israel is moving towards destruction.

Khamenei described Hamas leader in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh as a "mujahed," or holy fighter, and insisted "the Iranian nation will never let you [Hamas] be alone."

Israel "has weakened day by day... Today, officials of the Zionist regime acknowledge that they are moving towards weakness, destruction, and defeat," added Khamenei, in a possible reference to recent despairing comments by departing Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert.

During an Eid al-Fitr holiday prayers that end the holy month of Ramadan, Khamenei said, "Definitely, the world of Islam... will watch the day Palestine is at the disposal of the Palestinian people, in the hands of the landlords."

Though railing against Israel less often than Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Khamenei has previously declared Israel is a "cancerous tumor" that must be eliminated from the Middle East.

Meanwhile, a leading Iranian nuclear envoy on Thursday suggested his country could reconsider its uranium enrichment program if it gets ironclad guarantees of regular international fuel supplies for its nuclear power plants.

"We are going to continue [uranium enrichment] as long as there is no legally binding internationally recognized instrument for assurance of supply," said Ali Ashgar Soltanieh, the chief Iranian delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

If all 145 members of the UN's atomic energy agency concluded a legally binding agreement to guarantee a constant supply of fuel, Soltanieh told reporters, "then Iran would be able to reconsider the position that we have now."

However, he declined to clarify whether that meant that Iran would halt its enrichment program in return for such international guarantees, suggesting it might have to continue at a diminished level in case the outside supply stops.

The comments stand in contrast to Iran’s steadfast rejection of international pressure to give up enrichment, which could produce fissile material for atomic warheads. Previous efforts to persuade Iran to stop its enrichment program by offering outside fuel supplies, notably from Russia, have failed.

The news comes as David Kay, a former US head of weapons-hunting in Iraq, estimated yesterday that the Islamic Republic will be able to develop a nuclear bomb within two to five years. According to Kay’s analysis, Iran is 80 percent close to going nuclear, but the 20 percent remaining efforts are the most difficult.

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