The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) warned that Israel would face quick retaliatory attacks if it continued targeting its members in the Middle East.
“Be aware that we will not only take part in the funeral of our martyrs, but also immediately take their revenge. This is a real and serious message. If your mischief is repeated, you will once again experience our attacks and suffer the bitter taste of our missile blows,” the semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted Revolutionary Guards Commander-in-Chief Hossein Salami, addressing Israel, as saying.
“In recent weeks you have seen how Zionists are always wrong in their calculations and have been targeted by Revolutionary Guards missiles. We are warning them that they should cease their mischief or we will bury them alive,” Salami added.
Israel had condemned the US plans to remove the IRGC from its list of terrorist organizations.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Sunday that “the IRGC is the largest, most murderous terrorist organization in the world, and unlike ISIS or other organizations, they have a state behind them.”
“We are very concerned about the United States’ intention to give in to Iran’s outrageous demand and remove the IRGC from the list of terrorist organizations,” Bennett said at a cabinet meeting.
The Revolutionary Guards claimed responsibility on Mar. 13 for an attack on “Israeli strategic centers” in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. More than ten missiles hit residential areas, according to the Kurdish authorities.
Initially, the attack was seen as retaliation for the death of Revolutionary Guards members in Syria in an Israeli airstrike on Mar. 7.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said that the Israeli airstrike targeted weapons and ammunition depots near Damascus airport.
However, reports from pro-Iranian websites stated that the attack came in response to an Israeli airstrike deep inside Iranian territory before Israeli media confirmed, last week, the destruction of a drone fleet at an IRGC base in mid-February.
Haaretz newspaper reported that six Israeli drones carried out an airstrike on a site containing hundreds of drones in Kermanshah province, western Iran.
A senior intelligence official briefed on the operation told the New York Times that six suicide quadcopter drones exploded into the Iranian facility near Kermanshah, Iran, on Feb. 12.
The official, who asked not to be identified when discussing sensitive intelligence issues, said the facility was one of Iran’s main manufacturing and storage plants for military drones and that the Israeli attack destroyed dozens of them.
The New York Times considered the attack on the Iranian drone facility a part of a new approach in countering Iran’s growing drone program, a tacit recognition that it is easier to pre-emptively destroy a drone than to intercept one en-route.
Iranian drones have been deployed in numerous attacks against Israel.
Last month, Nour News website reported a fire at an IRGC base in the Mahidasht region of Kermanshah Province, without any casualties.
“On Monday morning, a fire broke out in a stockroom where motor oil and other flammable materials were stored in one of the support bases of the Revolutionary Guards,” Nour news reported.
Source » aawsat