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Iranian IRGC Issues ‘Quds Day’ Call for Israel’s Destruction as US Wrestles With Terrorism Designation

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Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Commander Hossein Salami speaking in Tehran. Photo: Reuters/Nazanin Tabatabaee/WANA

The Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) issued an open call for Israel’s destruction on Friday, just days after the US Secretary of State cast fresh doubt on the prospects for lifting the organization’s terrorism designation.

In a statement to mark “Quds Day” — an annual Iranian-regime backed event advocating the violent elimination of the Jewish state — the IRGC denounced any compromise with Israel as an “unforgivable sin.”

The statement condemned those Arab and Muslim states that had agreed to “the normalization of relations with the fake and child-killing Israeli regime… as a repetition of the great historical mistake of the traitor Anwar Sadat [the former Egyptian President assassinated in 1981] which is doomed to failure and unforgivable betrayal.”

Meanwhile, at a Quds Day rally in Tehran, the IRGC’s commander threatened Israel that Iran “will not leave you alone.”

“Stop your vicious deeds. You know well that we are people of action and reaction,” Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, declared.

“Our responses are painful. You create conditions for your own destruction. We will not leave you alone … You know better than me what will befall you if you take evil action,” he continued.

The IRGC’s harsh rhetoric targeting Israel came at the end of a week that saw the top US diplomat insist two separate occasions that its designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) would not be so easily removed.

Addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken remarked that the “only way I could see [the FTO designation] being lifted is if Iran takes steps necessary to justify the lifting of that designation. So it knows what it would have to do in order to see that happen.”

In the same session, Blinken told Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) that he shared his suspicion of the IRGC, “especially a number of its component parts, notably the Quds Force, which is primarily responsible for the egregious actions that it has taken in terms of targeting Americans, and as you rightly say, continuing to do so.”

The IRGC’s “Quds Force” is responsible for the organization’s foreign operations; its former commander, Lt. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, was assassinated by a US air strike on the airport in the Iraqi capital Baghdad in Jan. 2020.

Separately, Blinken reiterated his position on Thursday during an appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “That’s correct,” he replied when asked if the IRGC would have to “cease support for terrorism” for the designation to be lifted.

The IRGC’s Quds Day statement offered full-throated support for terrorist groups targeting Israel, however, declaring that “support for the Iran-initiated Axis of Resistance is the only solution to the Palestinian problem.”

Meanwhile, other senior members of the Iranian regime’s leadership used the occasion of Quds Day to warn against any future peace deals between Muslim states and Israel.

“The truth is that as long as the usurping, criminal Zionist regime is dominating al-Quds [Jerusalem], all days of the year should be considered Quds Day,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s “supreme leader,” stated in a televised speech. “The Holy al-Quds is the heart of Palestine, and the entirety of Palestine, from the river to the sea, is al-Quds spread out.”

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