The attack, claimed by ISIL (ISIS), occurred on Wednesday in Kerman during a memorial ceremony for Supreme Commander Qassem Soleimani.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi then promised retaliatory measures Double bombings In the city of Kerman, scores of people were killed and injured this week as they attended a memorial ceremony for top general Qassem Soleimani.

On Friday, Raisi addressed thousands of mourners gathered in Kerman, about 820 km (510 miles) southeast of the capital Tehran.

He said Tehran’s enemies can “see Iran’s power and the whole world knows its strength and capabilities,” adding that “our armed forces will decide the place and time of action.”

As people paid their respects to the victims in front of coffins decorated with Iranian flags, they chanted: “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”

ISIL (ISIS) claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s bombings in a statement on Thursday.

The explosions killed at least 89 people and injured more than 280. Several Afghan nationals were among those killed.

“We will find you wherever you are,” the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Major General Hossein Salami, told the crowd, referring to ISIS.

ISIL said two of its members detonated explosive belts in the crowded cemetery where many people had gathered at a memorial to Soleimani, the head of the IRGC’s elite Quds Force, who was killed in a US-ordered drone strike in 2020 Iraq was killed. President Donald Trump.

State television showed footage from the Imam Ali religious center in Kerman, where grieving families mourned and people chanted “revenge, revenge.”

The United Nations, the European Union and several countries including China, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Germany and Iraq condemned the bombings.

Tehran frequently claims that both Israel and the US support anti-Iran armed groups that have been involved in previous attacks.

In 2022, ISIL claimed responsibility for an attack on an Iranian Shiite shrine that killed 15 people. Previous attacks attributed to ISIL include two bombings in 2017 on the Iranian parliament and the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic.

Al Jazeera’s Ali Hashem, reporting from Tehran, said Iranian authorities linked the attack to growing regional tensions during Israel’s Gaza war.

“You can’t see this in isolation from what’s happening in the region,” Hashem said.

“The Iranians did not take ISIS’s statement seriously. Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi told us that the matter is being examined and that we will have our say in the coming hours.”

The attacks occurred a day after the murder of Saleh al-Arouria deputy leader of the Palestinian armed group Hamas, an ally of Iran, in a drone strike in the Lebanese capital Beirut, raising fears of further escalation in the region after the Israeli attack began War in Gaza on October 7th.

Raisi said the end of the Al-Aqsa flood, the name of the operation launched by Hamas on October 7, “will mean the end of the Zionist regime.” [Israel]“.