The Israeli government released a scathing response Friday to reports that the Biden administration is preparing to remove Iran’s Revolutionary Guards from the US terror blacklist.
In a joint statement, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said they "refuse to believe" that the US would take such a step.
"The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is a terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of people, including Americans. We refuse to believe that the United States would remove its designation as a terrorist organization."
On Wednesday, Axios cited a source familiar with Biden administration plans regarding Iran who claimed that the US is considering dropping the Revolutionary Guards from the US terror blacklist.
The force was designated as a terrorist group by the Trump administration in 2019.
"The Iranian Revolutionary Guards are Hezbollah in Lebanon, they are Islamic Jihad in Gaza, they are the Houthis in Yemen, they are the militias in Iraq,” Bennett and Lapid said Friday.
“The IRGC are responsible for attacks on American civilians and American forces throughout the Middle East, including in the past year. The IRGC were behind plans to assassinate senior American government officials.”
“The IRGC were involved in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians, 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. Their hands have on them the blood of thousands of Iranians and the crushed soul of the Iranian society.”
“The attempt to delist the IRGC as a terrorist organization is 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.”
“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."