“They kill Jews because they are Jews, Christians because they are Christians, and Muslims because they refuse to surrender to them,” PM Bennett and FM Lapid stressed about the IRGC.
By Gil Tanenbaum, TPS
Israel is concerned that the U.S. government is considering dropping Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from its list of organizations that it designates as terrorists.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister (and co-premiere) Yair Lapid issued a joint statement urging the Americans not to do so.
“The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is a terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of people, including Americans,” they declared. “We refuse to believe that the United States would remove its designation as a terrorist organization.”
The Israeli leaders pointed out that the IRGC operates in several countries, like Lebanon and Yemen, where it provides support to terrorist organizations like Hezbollah, the Houthis and also Hamas in Gaza.
The IRGC, the two pointed out, is responsible for attacks on American civilians and American forces throughout the Middle East, including in the past year and was behind plans to assassinate senior American government officials.
“The IRGC was involved in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians,” said Lapid and Bennett, “they destroyed Lebanon and they are brutally oppressing Iranian civilians. They kill Jews because they are Jews, Christians because they are Christians, and Muslims because they refuse to surrender to them.”
They are an integral part of the brutal machine of oppression in Iran, stressed Lapid and Bennett saying, “Their hands have on them the blood of thousands of Iranians and the crushed soul of the Iranian society.”
The Prime Minister and Foreign Minister went on to call the attempt to delist the IRGC as a terrorist organization an “insult to the victims and would ignore documented reality supported by unequivocal evidence. We find it hard to believe that the IRGC’s designation as a terrorist organization will be removed in exchange for a promise not to harm Americans.”
Bennett and Lapid concluded their comments by adding that the fight against terrorism “is a global one, a shared mission of the entire world. We believe that the United States will not abandon its closest allies in exchange for empty promises from terrorists.”