Israel's foreign minister on Thursday accused the United Nations of appeasing Iran in a post on X with a manipulated image depicting the UN chief bowing before Iran's supreme leader, signaling a new low for their relationship.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz chastised the body for not condemning Iran or Lebanon's Hezbollah after the Tehran-backed group launched an attack which killed an Israeli citizen and four foreign workers.
"UN Secretary-General @antonioguterres did not bother to condemn Hezbollah or call for sanctions against them. He is only busy attacking Israel and appeasing terrorist organizations and the Iranian axis of evil that calls for its destruction," Katz wrote.
"Guterres and the @UN have long lost their compass and conscience. We will continue to fight until all residents of the north can safely return to their homes."
Israel passed a law on Monday banning the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA from operating in the country, in a move that could impact its work in Gaza as the humanitarian situation there continues to deteriorate.
In a speech at the General Assembly last month, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked the United Nations as an “antisemitic swamp” and an “anti-Israel Flat Earth Society”, maintaining Israel's right to confront Iran and its allies in the region.
Israel this month barred U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres from entering the country because it said he had not sufficiently condemned Iran's missile attack on Israel on October 1.
Fierce fighting
Meanwhile fighting continued to rage around Israel's northern border as a hoped-for ceasefire to fighting between Hezbollah and Israel failed to materialize.
The Israeli military made a rare statement saying it had hit "weapons storage facilities and command centers" belonging to Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force and the group’s armament unit in the al-Qusayr area, close to Lebanon’s border with Syria.
According to Syrian state media, a number of civilians were wounded and material damage was caused by the Israeli strikes in Homs province.
Earlier in the day, the Hezbollah attack on northern Israel's Metula referred to by Katz killed five people, as Lebanon said Israeli strikes killed six health workers in the country's south.
US envoys and Israeli officials were due to meet in Israel on Thursday to discuss efforts towards a ceasefire in both Lebanon, where Israeli forces are battling Iran-backed Hezbollah, and in Gaza, where they are fighting Iran-backed Hamas.
The United States will help oversee a Hezbollah-Israel ceasefire by which UN forces and the Lebanese army replace the Iran-backed group in the south of the country, according to an unverified draft published by Israel's Channel 11.
Israel has been carrying out strikes against Iranian-linked targets in Syria for more than a decade as Iran has increased its presence since the Syrian civil war began in 2011.
Raids have also ramped up since last year's October 7 attack on Israel by Palestinian militant group Hamas sparked the Gaza war. Iranian-backed militants from Syria, along with countries such as Iraq and Yemen, have been acting against Israel since October 7, in allegiance with Hamas after its invasion of Israel.
Israel has historically been one of the toughest places to recruit spies and foreign operatives, but recent weeks have seen a surge in arrests of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Azerbaijan.
The latest citizens to be arrested were a married couple, Rafael and Lela Goliev, who live in the mixed Arab and Jewish city of Lod. The 32-year-olds were arrested after carrying out tasks on behalf of an Iranian infrastructure that recruits Israeli immigrants from the Caucasus countries, Israeli authorities say.
The investigation revealed that Rafael Goliev was recruited into the plot by fellow Azeri Elshan Agayev, 56, acting on behalf of Iranian officials.
“As part of the operation, Golayev carried out surveillance missions on security sites in Israel, including the Mossad's headquarters, and collected intelligence on an academic working at the Institute for Security Studies who the Iranians marked as an assassination target,” a statement from Israel Police said.
Goliev was also asked to locate a person who would serve as the assassin for the Iranian operation. Some of the tasks were carried out by Goliev with the help of his wife Lela who will be served with an indictment today.
The two, both of Azeri origin, had been in contact with the handler since 2021, but in the last month, it is the sixth cell busted for working for Iran. In the last year, the incidences have spiked, reaching a head in October with all the cases coming from either Russia or Azerbaijan.
Israel’s former head of Interpol, Asher Ben Artzi, told Iran International on Thursday as the news broke that the situation reflects a disconnected segment of Israel’s immigrant population. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, several Jews used the right of return to move to Israel and thousands more Russians have fled to the Jewish state in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
“These people come from a very closed society, it’s not like native born Israelis who could never conceive of doing such a thing,” he said. “In all my years in the security services here, I never thought I would see this day. It’s a tragic thing that people who come here seeking refuge, can do this all for the pursuit of greed.”
Immigrants from the former Soviet Union tend to live in more closed communities and integrate less than other immigrants, as well as often being among the less economically well-off segments of the population.
Iranian-born Israeli Beni Sabti, also a researcher at the INSS, told Iran International that Iranians are catching “people or communities in Israel who are not paid enough and are dissatisfied in life”, a vulnerable sector of society which now numbers around one million of Israel’s 10 million population.
Ronen Solomon, an Israeli defense and intelligence analyst, told Iran International that using Azeri for communications may have revealed a gap in Israel’s monitoring capabilities, which are more robust for Persian and Hebrew languages.
Ben Arzti, a veteran of Israel’s security and intelligence sector, noted that Iran enjoys greater operational freedom in Azerbaijan, enabling it to potentially recruit and groom agents there for deployment to Israel.
Solomon further suggested that the recruited Azeris may come from Iran’s Azeri speaking population, making them especially vulnerable to recruitment efforts.
Like previous plots, Solomon said the fact they communicate on Telegram also exposes the weakness of the social media platform which protects the identity of users even when engaged in criminal activity.
Other targets of surveillance in the operation included the Moldovan consulate in Tel Aviv, the national electric company, the port of Haifa, public shelters in Tel Aviv, and graves of victims of the October 7 attacks.
According to the indictment, Goliev received an amount of approximately $600 for each day of surveillance and photography in the mission. His handlers ordered him to purchase an operational phone, high quality cameras, a laptop as well as to use the coding software they installed on the laptop, in order to transfer the information they collected safely. In total, the couple received around $26,000, the police said.
Tamir Hyman, the former head of Israeli defense intelligence and head of the INSS, told Israel’s Ynet: "It is not surprising that the members of the Institute for National Security Studies are a target for Iran and its proxies. Although the institute is an independent research institute, and is not part of the defense establishment, it is the leading defense research institute in Israel and as such, Iran seeks to harm its people.”
Last week, an indictment was filed against seven residents of northern Israel who operated as part of an organized squad recruited by an Iranian agent, and during the war engaged in information gathering and photography of military facilities and bases - among others, those that were the target of the Iranian missile attack on October 1.
