Last month, Britain imposed sanctions on the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and reports this week suggest it plans to classify the entire organization as a terrorist entity, triggering further measures. Oved Lobel points out that the group fits all of Australia’s official criteria for designating terrorist groups, and urges Canberra to follow suit:

The IRGC . . . has directly engaged in terrorism across the world and its ideology is explicitly jihadist. It also has strong, decades-long operational links to several groups listed by Australia as terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), al-Qaeda, and Hizballah; indeed, in the case of Hizballah and even PIJ, it’s unclear whether they should even be considered separate groups from the IRGC.

Moreover, both directly and via Hizballah, the IRGC has links to Australia and is a direct threat to Australian interests, be it non-proliferation goals; attacks on maritime shipping; regional destabilization and aggression; terrorism promotion regionally and globally; kidnapping or assassinating regime opponents across the world; piracy and hostage-taking; material support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; human-rights atrocities, and many, many others.

Additionally, the IRGC is intimidating, threatening, and surveilling regime opponents inside Australia itself. Given that the IRGC has attempted to kidnap or assassinate regime opponents in the UK, U.S., Canada, and across the world, and occasionally succeeded, the idea that the same is not happening in Australia is inconceivable. The IRGC poses a direct threat to the lives of Australian citizens and residents, particularly those of Iranian background.

Australia has done too little when it comes to Iran—acting later than our allies and even then only after mounting domestic and external pressure—apparently out of the misguided belief that Iran is far away and not our problem.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.