Iranians take part in a funeral procession for the late Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Tehran, Jan. 6, 2020. Photo: Nazanin Tabatabaee / WANA (West Asia News Agency) via Reuters.

The Tehran regime was unlikely to strike back immediately for the killing last week of one of its top officials in a US drone strike in Baghdad last week, a former Israeli national security adviser said on Monday.

“The Iranians are not hurrying to retaliate,” Maj. Gen. (ret.) Yaakov Amidror said during a Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) telephone briefing on the death of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). “It will take time.”

On the same call, another retired IDF general, Yaacov Ayish, predicted, “One thing is very clear, they [the Iranians] will try to avoid [a] full-scale war.”

“It is very clear to them that once they cross that line it will be a disaster for them,” the ex-Israeli defense attaché to the US added. “Iran will want to show that it has not changed its policy in response to this one killing.”

In Amidror’s view, the US strike sent a message to Iran and other countries in the Middle East — “we are Americans…if you push us into the corner and cross red lines which are important to us, America knows how to react.”

“Iran seems to understand that they miscalculated the sensitivity to the US of its embassy and now they will have to re-calculate very carefully the new red lines,” he surmised.

Israeli policy toward Iran would probably remain the same following Soleimani’s demise, Amidror noted.

“We are in a confrontation with the Iranians in Syria for a long time…and the main goal is to stop Iran from building the independent war machine in Syria,” he said.