Israel En Directo

[Ceasar Doyle]

Theauthorities cracked down on the demonstrations, killing hundreds and arresting thousands of protesters.

The clerical establishment has long maintained that it derives its legitimacy from the will of the people. But that claim has been increasingly questioned in recent years.

The parliamentary elections in 2020 and the presidential vote in 2021 saw record-low turnouts, with less than half of eligible voters casting their ballots in both elections.

There are similar concerns about a poor turnout in the upcoming parliamentary and Assembly of Experts elections scheduled for next month.

The authorities have also grappled with a worsening economy that has been crippled by international sanctions and government mismanagement, leading to soaring inflation, rising unemployment, and growing poverty.

Aside from having a conventionally superior military, Israel also has a nuclear deterrent, said John Krzyzaniak, a research associate at the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.

Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, with the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative estimating that Israel has around 90 nuclear warheads.

Under decades of sanctions, Iran has invested heavily in developing domestic weapons programs, resulting in cheap and effective drones and missiles.

Iranian officials have boasted that some of its weapons have been developed specifically to hit Israel. For example, officials have claimed that a Fattah ballistic missile can reach Tel Aviv in 400 seconds.

A heart surgeon by training, reformist Pezeshkian is a former health minister and multiterm lawmaker who was elected president earlier this month in a snap election held after the death of hard-line president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May.

The first round of voting on June 28 had voter participation of 39 percent -- a record-low turnout for a presidential election in the history of the Islamic republic. The runoff vote on July 5, which saw Pezeshkian face off against ultraconservative candidate Saeed Jalili, saw the turnout rise to around 49 percent.

Government offices and banks throughout Iran were to remain closed on July 28 to avoid overtaxing power networks amid "extreme and unprecedented heat," which prompted similar shutdowns earlier this week, officials said. Temperatures reached nearly 50 degrees Celsius in the southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan Province and in the central Yadz Province, and were above 45 degrees in at least 10 provinces. The heatwave struck on July 24 before easing slightly, but the government ordered shortened working hours from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. at all government centers on July 27 after the Energy Ministry predicted "difficult conditions" for electricity production and supply. To read the original story by RFE/RL's Radio Farda, click here.

In an open letter years ago, Sheikheh and the other six suspects denied all charges and alleged that they were subjected to various forms of torture, including mock executions, sleep deprivation, and being hung from the ceiling.

Haqdar fled Iran after a leaked document allegedly prepared by the Intelligence Ministry listed his name among several authors and translators accused of fomenting sedition in the aftermath of the controversial 2009 presidential election.

Javaid Rehman, the UN's special rapporteur on the rights situation in Iran, said in a July 22 report that the summary and extrajudicial executions during 1981-82 and in 1988 amounted to crimes against humanity as well as genocide.

It is not the first time the mass executions have been described as genocide. But observers say Rehman's findings were an important step toward holding the Islamic republic accountable for its crimes.

The victims were "arbitrarily detained and subjected to systematic patterns of enforced disappearance, torture and summary, arbitrary and extrajudicial executions on religiously motivated and vaguely defined charges," the report said.

During the summer of 1988, an estimated 5,000 prisoners were secretly executed in prisons. Many of the victims were members of the MKO, which had aligned with Baghdad during the devastating 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.

Former prison official Hamid Nouri in 2022 became the first, and only, Iranian official to be convicted for his role in the executions, though he was ultimately released as part of a prisoner swap between Stockholm and Tehran.

Gissou Nia, a human rights lawyer and director of the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council in Washington, says the special rapporteur's findings can set the stage for the UN to "establish some further inquiry that has a documentation and accountability function."

"What is incredibly important is that some of the perpetrators of the 1988 massacre continue to travel or have children in jurisdictions that do have the ability to prosecute atrocity crimes," Nia told RFE/RL.

The German government on July 24 banned a Hamburg-based organization accused of promoting the Iranian leadership's ideology and supporting Lebanon's Hizballah militant group, as police raided 53 properties around the country. The ban on the Islamic Center Hamburg, or IZH, and five suborganizations around Germany followed searches in November. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said evidence gathered in the investigation "confirmed the serious suspicions to such a degree that we ordered the ban today." The IZH "promotes an Islamist-extremist, totalitarian ideology in Germany," while it and its suborganizations "also support the terrorists of Hizballah and spread aggressive antisemitism," Faeser said in a statement.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have intercepted a Togo-flagged, U.A.E.-managed tanker carrying 1,500 tons of marine gas oil, British security firm Ambrey said on July 22. The vessel was intercepted 113 kilometers southwest of Iran's port of Bushehr en route to the U.A.E. from Iraq, Ambrey said. The owner lost contact with the tanker as it was arrested, but Ambrey said the incident was likely a counter-smuggling operation by the IRGC. Iran has some of the world's cheapest fuel prices due to heavy subsidies and the plunge in the value of its currency, making smuggling for resale on world markets very profitable.

Rights groups say Iranian authorities executed eight people over the weekend, bolstering concerns that the regime may accelerate the carrying out of death sentences after a lull ahead a snap presidential election held earlier this month.

The human rights-focused news agency HRANA reported that four people, including an Afghan national, were hanged on July 21 in Qezel Hesar prison in Karaj. The news agency said they were convicted of drug-related charges.

Separately, the Oslo-based organization Iran Human Rights said four people, including a woman, were hanged on July 20 in a prison in Shiraz. Three of them were convicted of murder and one was found guilty of rape.

Because the Iranian government does not publish official statistics on the number of executions, international and Iranian rights groups document cases using open-source data such as state media and human rights organizations.

An Iranian warship that keeled over while under repair almost two weeks ago has been salvaged, according to the Fars news agency. Experts from the Iranian Navy managed to lift the vessel, the agency reported. Despite the damage sustained, naval experts were confident that the ship, the Sahand, could be repaired. The warship capsized in early July during repairs in the port of Bandar Abbas on the Strait of Hormuz, injuring many workers. Equipped with modern radar and missile systems, the destroyer was one of the country's most important warships and the pride of the Iranian Navy.

Iran is capable of producing fissile material for use in a nuclear weapon within "one or two weeks," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on July 19. Despite comments by Iran's new president, Masud Pezeshkian, who has said he favors reviving the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and global powers, Blinken said the United States had seen indications in recent weeks that Iran has moved forward with its nuclear program. Blinken blamed the collapse of the nuclear deal in 2018 for the acceleration in Iran's capabilities. "Instead of being at least a year away from having the breakout capacity of producing fissile material for a nuclear weapon, [Iran] is now probably one or two weeks away from doing that," Blinken said at a security forum in Colorado.

The homes of several Afghan migrants in the southern Iranian city of Khur have reportedly been set on fire in apparent retaliation for the killing of an Iranian man allegedly by an Afghan national.

Hosna and others who spoke to Radio Azadi attributed the anger to the July 3 killing of a 62-year-old restaurant owner in the town of Khenj by his 17-year-old apprentice. Iranian media have not identified the nationality of the suspected killer, but Hosna said the suspect was an Afghan citizen.

The authorities have vowed to deport illegal refugees and hundreds of Afghan migrants are sent back to Afghanistan every day. They are also banned from living or working in half of Iran's 31 provinces.

Tehran is upping the ante in its effort to go after Iranian Kurds abroad it deems "terrorists," demanding that Baghdad extradite leaders and members of Iranian-Kurdish opposition groups based in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdish region.

"A list of nearly 120 terrorists who identify themselves as noble Kurds has been sent to Iraq for extradition and their trial will be held soon," Iranian judiciary official Kazem Gharibabadi said on July 13.

Many of these groups were armed, with some demanding autonomy within Iran and others fighting for secession from the Islamic republic. Kurds make up around 10 percent of Iran's population of some 88 million and primarily live in the country's west along the border with Iraq.

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