TEHRAN (AFP) – Iran will “blow up the heart” of Israel if attacked by the Jewish state or the United States, an aide to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quoted on Friday as saying.

“Even if one American or Zionist missile hits our land, before the dust is settled, Iranian missiles will blow up the heart of Israel,” state news agency IRNA quoted Khamenei’s representative to the elite Revolutionary Guards, Mojtaba Zolnour, as saying.

Iranian officials have repeatedly said that Tehran would carry out severe reprisals if Israel or the United States attack the country.

The United States and its regional ally Israel have never ruled out a military option to stop Tehran’s nuclear drive, which the West says is aimed at making nuclear weapons while Iran says it is solely for peaceful ends.

At the end of September, armed forces chief of staff General Hassan Firouzabadi dismissed Israeli threats against Iran, saying the Jewish state was a “paper tiger.”

After the 1979 Islamic revolution, Tehran stopped withdrew is recognition of Israel.

The Jewish state considers the Islamic republic to be its arch-enemy after repeated statements by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the Holocaust was a “myth” and that Israel is doomed to be “wiped off the map.”