The United States will hold Tehran responsible if Hamas kills the hostages in Gaza, US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) said Sunday in Tel Aviv during a visit by a bipartisan delegation of 10 US senators.
“We are here today to tell Iran that we are watching you,” he told reporters.
“If this war grows, it’s coming to your backyard,” Graham warned Iran.
The international community has scrambled to prevent the war in Gaza from spreading to the wider region. The war began on October 7, when Hamas infiltrated southern Israel, killing more than 1,400 civilians and soldiers and taking 212 people hostage, including Americans. Two US hostages have been released.
The US has worked to prevent a second front with Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy group, from escalating in the North, where skirmishes near the border are already occurring and from which communities have been evacuated.
The Biden administration is particularly concerned about direct Iranian-American hostilities.
Graham warned Tehran about a US-Iranian battleground should Hezbollah start a war with the IDF.
No war on two fronts
“There won’t be two fronts; there will be three,” he said, adding that if there is “an effort to unleash Hezbollah on the Jewish state to destroy it, my attention will be to Tehran.”
“You could stop it, if you chose to,” Graham said. He accused Tehran of masterminding the October 7 attack, despite the lack of concrete evidence of such direct involvement.
“The idea that this happened without Iranian involvement is laughable,” Graham said, adding that Tehran has supplied 93% of Hamas’s budget for decades.
“The training, the equipment all come from the ayatollah,” he said.
Graham, who has been a strong supporter of a US-Saudi security pact that would include a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, said he believed the attack was an attempt to derail that deal.
“You will never convince me that this is not about reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Israel,” he said.
“The Iranians, through their proxy Hamas, unleashed holy hell on Israel to stop the march toward a better Middle East and a better world,” he added.
“My goal is for them to fail – for Iran to fail,” Graham said. But for that to happen, he said, “Israel must destroy Hamas,” and “only then can the Palestinians have a better life, and the Middle East can march away from the darkness and toward the light.”
The senators, who arrived in Israel after visiting Saudi Arabia, met with families of those who lost loved ones in the October 7 terrorist attack.
They said they were shocked by the level of the atrocities Hamas committed during the attack, including burning their victims and dismembering them.
“I have seen things today that I did not think were possible in 2023,” Graham said. “The level of barbaric behavior here is beyond my ability to explain it.”
The other senators in the delegation are Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), Susan Collins (R-Maine), John Thune (R-South Dakota), Chris Coons (D-Delaware), Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), and Katie Britt (R-Alabama).