PM, Lapid urge US not to delist IRGC as terror group: ‘Don’t abandon closest allies’
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid urged the United States not to delist Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terror organization in a joint statement on Friday, as Washington moves closer to reviving the nuclear agreement with Tehran.
“The Revolutionary Guards are a terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of people, including Americans. We have a hard time believing that the United States will remove it from the definition of a terrorist organization,” Bennett and Lapid said.
The two ministers said that the fight against terror was a global mission: “We believe that the United States will not abandon its closest allies in exchange for empty promises from terrorists.”
“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,” the statement read. “The Revolutionary Guards are behind the attacks on American civilians and soldiers throughout the Middle East, including in the past year. They are the ones behind the plans to assassinate senior American government officials.”
“The Revolutionary Guards took part in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians, they destroyed Lebanon, they are engaged in the murderous repression of Iranian civilians. They kill Jews because they are Jews, Christians because they are Christians, and Muslims because they do not surrender to them,” the statement charged.
Read More: Times of Israel