Iran said on Tuesday it had fired long-range ballistic missiles from a warship for the first time, a new step in the development of its military program.
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A ship belonging to the Revolutionary Guard, the ideological power army, “fired ballistic missiles for the first time” while in the Gulf of Oman in the Indian Ocean, state television said, broadcasting images of the operation.
“The launch of a long-range ballistic missile from a ship was successfully carried out,” Guard Commander Hossein Salami said.
“Our ships can be present anywhere on the oceans. “There is no safe place for powers that want to threaten our security,” he added.
State television said the two missiles fired from the Shahid Mahdavi ship had “a range of at least 1,700 kilometers” and had reached a desert town in central Iran.
The continued development of Iran's missile arsenal worries many countries, especially the United States and Israel, which fear that its territory could be reached by Iranian weapons.
The Revolutionary Guard also announced Tuesday that it conducted an exercise simulating a surface-to-surface missile attack on Israel's Palmachim air base south of Tel Aviv.
According to state television, Palmachim is “the main base for the Zionist regime’s F-35 fighter jets.”
Iran, which does not recognize Israel, has presented itself as one of Hamas's main supporters since the beginning of the war in Gaza, which was triggered by an unprecedented attack by the Palestinian movement in southern Israel on October 7.
Tehran also supports Yemen's Houthi rebels, who have been attacking transport ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden since November, triggering retaliatory attacks from the US and Britain.