Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, issued a stark warning on March 8 that any strikes on Iranian infrastructure will be met with equivalent retaliation, casting Tehran as a more assertive and calibrated actor in a widening regional confrontation.
Speaking through the Tasnim news agency, Ghalibaf blamed the United States and Israel for driving inflation and insecurity across the Middle East and said recent operations demonstrated new missile tactics that complicate adversary air-defence calculations.
He asserted that Iran’s “Operation True Commitment 4” has seen Tehran shift toward asymmetric approaches and improved missile precision, reducing salvo sizes not because of weakness but to prioritise quality and accuracy. Ghalibaf went as far as to claim that Israel’s Iron Dome — designed to intercept short-range rockets — is increasingly strained by the ballistic and cruise threats Iran says it can field.
The speaker framed Tehran’s posture as deterrence rather than escalation. He rejected ceasefire overtures with what he called “invaders,” insisting that persistent attacks on Iranian energy reserves or other critical infrastructure would prompt proportional responses aimed at punishment rather than conciliation.
Ghalibaf also launched a political critique of the United States, accusing former President Donald Trump of relying on flawed Israeli intelligence and prioritising Israeli interests over American ones. He argued that Washington had misread the conflict’s trajectory, which he said had moved from an expected quick end into a protracted phase of attrition with knock-on effects for regional and global economies.
Taken together, the comments underscore the risks of inadvertent escalation. Tehran’s public claims about sharper, more precise missile employments and its threat to target infrastructure raise the prospect of disruptions to energy exports, shipping through strategic chokepoints and broader economic fallout, while exposing limits in current air-defence architectures and complicating U.S. and Israeli calculations about deterrence and retaliation.