Israeli FM Sa'ar calls on EU to designate Iran's 'Revolutionary Guards' a terrorist group

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar urged top European Union officials on Friday to officially proscribe the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a de facto terrorist organization.

“Today, the Revolutionary Guards are leading the repression and massacre of Iran's citizens,” Sa’ar said in a phone call with the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaya Kallas and EU president, Cypriot Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos.

Iranian officials have acknowledged that at least 2,000 anti-regime protesters have been killed in recent weeks. However, a new estimate indicates that the ayatollah regime may have murdered up to 12,000 demonstrators since the unrest began in late December 2025.

The IRGC was established in 1979 with the main task of protecting the ayatollah regime and exporting the Islamic Revolution abroad through terrorism, violence and radical ideology. The IRGC has also played a central role in silencing domestic opposition to the ayatollah regime with violence.

Following his phone call with the top EU officials, Sa'ar confirmed on 𝕏 that they had discussed “the Iranian regime’s murderous repression of the protests of the Iranian citizens and their struggle for freedom.”

Sa'ar further emphasized that the IRGC has been promoting “the spread of terror and instability in the Middle East and beyond,” citing its central role in building the ayatollah regime’s now severely degraded network of terrorist proxies across the region.

The Israeli foreign ministry said that designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization would be “an important practical step that would also send a moral message of hope to the people of Iran.”

This is not the first time that Jerusalem has urged the European countries to take legal measures against the Iranian militant group. At a NATO summit in July 2024, Israel’s then-Foreign Minister Israel Katz called on the EU to officially declare the IRGC a terrorist organization. Several countries, including the United States, Canada and Saudi Arabia, have already done so.

In May 2022, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett thanked former U.S. President Joe Biden for keeping the IRGC on the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list. calling it the "correct decision."

Last Monday, British Business Secretary Peter Kyle announced that the United Kingdom would not officially designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization, arguing that it would not be appropriate “for a foreign state organization” to be defined as a terrorist group, despite the IRGC’s deep involvement in terrorism in the Middle East and worldwide.

By contrast, in 2021, the UK designated the Hamas organization a terrorist organization when it acted as de facto state regime in Gaza.