The European Union will “start the necessary work” to hit Iran with heavier sanctions after Saturday’s aerial attack on Israel, the bloc’s top diplomat has said.
Speaking following an exceptional virtual meeting of EU foreign ministers on Tuesday, Josep Borrell said he would ask his services to study the possibility of expanding existing EU sanctions against Iranian drone technology.
It would see the current sanctions regime - established in July 2023 to punish Iran for aiding Putin’s war machine with unmanned drones - expanded to include missiles and to also cover Iran’s proxies in the region.
The bloc would also weigh the possibility of listing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organisation, he said, while stressing that such a move would be difficult since the military branch has not yet been associated with an act of terrorism in any of the EU’s member states.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The European Union will “start the necessary work” to hit Iran with heavier sanctions after Saturday’s aerial attack on Israel, the bloc’s top diplomat has said.
The bloc would also weigh the possibility of listing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organisation, he said, while stressing that such a move would be difficult since the military branch has not yet been associated with an act of terrorism in any of the EU’s member states.
EU countries have so far doubled down on their commitment to Israel’s security whilst urging Netanyahu’s government to exercise caution to prevent the conflict from spilling over into all-out war.
Some of these sanctions have been imposed in response to Tehran’s human rights violations - including following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 at the hands of Iran’s morality police - and the ensuing draconian crackdown on protesters.
More recently, the bloc established a new regime to prohibit the EU export of critical components used to manufacture deadly drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), that are then sold on to Moscow to bolster its war efforts in Ukraine.
The attack was a response to Israel’s recent airstrike on an Iranian diplomatic building in the Syrian capital of Damascus, which saw seven members of its Revolutionary Guard, including two top commanders, killed.
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