Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said Thursday that the repression of protests in Iran was comparable with the bloodshed in Gaza after he and his European counterparts agreed to put the country’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the Pâsdârân, on the EU list of terrorist organisations.

When asked what had made Rome change its position on whether IRGC should be considered a terrorist group, Tajani replied that it was “the thousands and thousands of deaths, perhaps 30,000 – we don’t know.

“We’re talking about a bloodbath. If there were 60,000 deaths in Gaza and 30,000 in Iran, then it’s a comparable situation to Gaza,” he said.

“Faced with all this, we necessarily had to have an attitude of condemnation”.

The Iranian government summoned Italy’s ambassador to Tehran this week after Tajani said he would propose classing the IRGC as a terror group like ISIS or al-Qaeda at Thursday’s meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels