Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini said his country is prepared to assist those who would confront Israel and the United States.

“From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help,” the leader of Iran’s theocracy said in a Friday sermon translated by the Associated Press. “We have no fear expressing this.”

Khameini called Israel “a cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut.”

He referred to the recent intensification of U.S.-led sanctions aimed at forcing Iran to back down from its suspected nuclear weapons program as well as repeated American warnings that a military option was possible.

“The threat of war would disfavor the United States itself,” he said, according to The New York Times, and the results would be “10 times worse” for the United States.