Iran plans to increase military budget by 200 percent

The increase in defense spending needs a nod from parliament and comes as Iran and Israel exchanged tit-for-tat missile strikes in October.

Iran plans to triple its military budget, a government spokeswoman said, as tensions rise with rival Israel amid the Israeli army’s offensives in Gaza and Lebanon.

The planned increase in the defense budget is part of a proposal that the government has submitted to parliament for approval, government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said on Tuesday.

“A significant increase of 200 percent has been observed in the country’s defense budget,” Mohajerani said, without giving further details.

The proposed budget will be debated, and lawmakers are expected to finalize it in March 2025.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) think tank, Iran’s military spending in 2023 was approximately $10.3 billion.

By comparison, Israel spent $27.5 billion on the military in 2023, according to SIPRI.

The Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank based in Washington, DC, said the United States provided at least $12.5 billion in military aid to Israel from October 7, 2023 to April 2024.

According to the latest available World Bank data, Iran’s spending on its military reached $6.85 billion in 2022.

On Saturday, the Israeli army launched attacks on military bases in Iran, hitting around 20 locations in Ilam, Khuzestan and Tehran over several hours, killing four soldiers.

Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar said from Tehran that the “sense of urgency” in Iran had increased after the attack “for the first time since the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.”

Israel’s response was long expected after Iran fired a barrage of missiles and drones into Israel on October 1, firing around 200 projectiles. Iran said the attack was in retaliation for attacks in recent months that killed leaders of the Lebanese group Hezbollah, the Palestinian group Hamas and the Iranian army.

With increasing Israeli attacks and pressure on Iran-linked Hezbollah, Serdar said: “Tehran’s defense doctrine has been to keep the war away from Iran no matter what,” adding: “Now that defense doctrine stands for enormous challenges as Iranian officials As we see the possibility of a conventional war at home, it is increasingly becoming a reality.”

On Monday, Iran said it would “use all available tools” to respond to Israel’s attack on military targets this weekend.

The US warned Iran of “serious consequences” if the country took further aggressive actions against Israel.

“We will not hesitate to act in self-defense. Let there be no confusion. We believe this must be the end of the direct firefight between Israel and Iran,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, told the UN Security Council.