Then-Israeli transportation minister Israel Katz attends the cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Feb. 17, 2019. Katz currently serves as the foreign minister. Photo: Sebastian Scheiner/Pool via REUTERS

Israel will attack Iran directly if the Islamist regime in Tehran targets the Jewish state from Iranian soil, Israel’s top diplomat warned on Wednesday.

“If Iran attacks from its own territory, Israel will respond and attack in Iran,” Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz wrote on X/Twitter in both Hebrew and Farsi, while tagging Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Less than an hour later, Khamenei tweeted what appeared to be a response to Katz, echoing what he said in a speech earlier in the day to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr. “When the Zionist regime attacks an Iranian consulate in Syria, it is as if it has attacked Iranian soil,” he wrote. “That malicious regime has made a wrong move. It should be punished, and it will be punished.”

Khamenei was referring to an airstrike on Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Syria last week that Iranian officials have attributed to Israel. The strike killed seven members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a US-designated terrorist organization, including two senior commanders.

One of the commanders was Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who headed the IRGC’s elite Quds Force in Lebanon and Syria. According to an Iranian political organization closely affiliated with Khamenei, the deceased Zahedi had “a strategic role” in “the planning and execution” of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. The Iranian regime is Hamas’s main international sponsor, providing the Palestinian terrorist group with arms, funding, and training.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the incident. However, Israel has been bracing for a retaliatory strike amid public threats from Iranian officials to attack Israeli targets.

“We will know how to defend ourselves and we will act according to the simple principle of whoever harms us or plans to harm us, we will harm them,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday.

The US has also been on high alert and preparing for a possible attack by Iran targeting Israeli or American assets in the Middle East as revenge for the Damascus strike.

Amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, analysts have warned of a larger conflict in the Middle East erupting if tensions between Israel and Iran continue to skyrocket.