The statement was issued by Israeli politician Yair Lapid hours after the US confirmed that Maduro had been kidnapped.WASHINGTON, DC — Following reports of the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Israeli leader Yair Lapid sent a message to Tehran:” The regime in Iran needs to pay attention closely to what is happening in Venezuela.”
Maduro’s ouster was just over one week after US President Donald Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and threatened fresh attacks on Iran.
While Washington’s motivations for confrontation with Caracas and Tehran are not the same, analysts say Trump’s act against Maduro increases the danger of war with Iran.
“A new lawlessness makes everything less stable and war more likely,” said Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council.
“Trump falls in love with “surgical” regime change, or gives Bibi the american imprimatur to do the same — it feels tough not to see how this has legs for all of the actors who want a return to war w Iran,” he tweeted.
“If Maduro is kidnapped then it might be enough for Iran to do something that would provoke some sort of military action”, such as developing its own deterrence or preempting US or Israeli strikes, he added.
🚨 BREAKING: A new report suggests Ayatollah Khamenei may be preparing to flee to Moscow. The Islamic Republic’s terrorist regime appears to be collapsing. History is unfolding in real time. pic.twitter.com/PthNTItKkj
— Awesome Jew (@Awesome_Jew_) January 4, 2026
Negar Mortazavi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, added that America’s actions in Venezuela underscore Trump’s maximalist goals in that country, which then lowers prospects of diplomacy.
“What I see and hear from Tehran is that they are not interested in speaking to the Trump administration as this administration seems to signal — that they want total surrender,” Mortazavi told Al Jazeera.
Abdi echoed that assessment. “This move only makes all doubts and suspicions in Iran that the US intentions were never genuine, [and supports] those who said engagement with the US is a waste of time and [who point to the necessity of developing a nuclear deterrent,” he told Al Jazeera.
The US raid kidnapping Maduro and taking him to the United States followed months of escalating attacks by the US president against Venezuela.
So with Maduro out, Iran’s limited network of allies could get even smaller after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the battering to its Lebanese ally Hezbollah.
The Iranian government promptly denounced the US attack on Venezuela as they urged the United Nations to make efforts and put a stop to the “illegal aggression”.
“The US criminal aggression against an independent sovereign state member of United Nations represents a blatant violation of all international and regional laws and regulations,” the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
“Its implications are not just about Iran,” Safavi said, but “impact the whole international system and will push even further acquiring erosion to destroying the UN Charter-based order.”
On Saturday, Rubio speculated that the kidnapping of Maduro sends a message to all Washington’s rivals in the Trump age.
“He means it when he says things,” the top US envoy told reporters, saying that when Putin promises to get something done, “he gets on the downside of a ‘why’ very quickly.”
But his Iranian counterpart, Ali Khamenei, increased the bellicose rhetoric after the US operation in Caracas.
“We will have never accepted the enemy,” Khamenei wrote on social media. “We will crush the enemy into the ground.”
Trump welcomed Netanyahu to Florida last week and said that if Iran rebuilds those missile or nuclear programmes, the US would bomb them again.
“Now I hear that they’re saying that they want to re-up, and do this whole thing again,” Trump said of Iran. “We’ll knock them down. We will knock the hell out of them.”
Israel declared war on Iran in June, assassinating that country’s top military commanders and several nuclear scientists and hundreds of civilians.
The United States participated: We bombed the three main nuclear sites of Iran.
Wile Trump has repeatedly claimed “US strikes wiped out Iran’s nuclear programme” and hailed the war as a victory, the Iranian government recovered from the attack.
Tehran retaliated with volleys of hundreds of rockets at Israel, dozens of which penetrated the country’s multi-layered air defences, and Iranian forces were able to keep launching until the conflict ended just before a ceasefire took hold.
Some critics contend that regime change was and is Israel’s objective in Iran, one Trump seems increasingly inclined to adopt.
On Friday morning, Trump quipped that the US is “locked and loaded” and prepared to strike Iran if the Iranian government murders protesters in the ongoing but sporadic antigovernment protests across the country.
Late Sunday, he repeated that threat. “If they do anything, I know they do — they are not going to get away with it,” the US president said.
Yet some detractors – among them, Republican US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – have maintained that if the US manages to get its hands on Venezuela’s oil this will mitigate the fallout of any war with Iran in terms of energy markets.
“The next thing you would expect to see is, by getting rid of Maduro, a clear play for the control over Venezuelan oil supplies — it means more stability when we roll into the next obvious regime change war in Iran,” Greene wrote on X Saturday.
Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran may seek to close if all-out war breaks out.
Venezuelan oil “could technically also potentially provide a cushion to the loss of supplies from GCC countries in theory,” Abdi said.
“But this would require a lot of things to go right for the US in Venezuela, and I think it is far too early to make that call,” he said.
