On February 3, during a rare Friday prayer lecture at Tehran University, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Iran would “support and help any nations, any groups fighting against the Zionist regime across the world, and we are not afraid of declaring this.” Khamenei continued, “The Zionist regime is a true cancer tumor on this region that should be cut off. And it definitely will be cut off.”

This threat by the most powerful man in the Iranian regime to eradicate the nation of Israel was televised and reported by many news outlets. The “cancer tumor” quotation was in the third paragraph, for example, of the Washington Post‘s Saturday story.