Restraint as strategy: Israel watches Iran’s unrest from afar

Multiple sources told Iran International that patrols and checkpoints were ubiquitous, with increased police and military deployments across urban centers, particularly in major cities.

In Tehran, daily life has slowed markedly, with many shops closed and streets quieter than usual.

Residents said movement, communications, healthcare activity, and access to educational institutions are under tight government control, describing the capital as subdued and tense, with people avoiding unnecessary travel or gatherings.

"It's like a de facto curfew," one Tehran resident said.

In Karaj, residents said that because of the dense presence of security forces, people cannot even speak comfortably with one another. Similar conditions have been reported in multiple parts of the country.

The expanded security footprint follows what rights groups and media outlets describe as a bloody crackdown on the protests.

Iran International reported on Tuesday that at least 12,000 people have been killed nationwide since the unrest began, while CBS News, citing an Iranian official, said the death toll could be as high as 20,000.

Tehran rejected those figures on Wednesday, dismissing them as claims spread by what it called “Mossad-backed” media.

‘Help on the way’

On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump urged Iranians to remain in the streets and take over state institutions, telling protesters that “help is on the way,” while exiled prince Reza Pahlavi has also called on Iranians to continue demonstrations.

The calls from abroad for sustained protest appear to be colliding with a harsher reality on the ground—at least for now.

In Shiraz, sources said security conditions intensified earlier this week, with additional military units deployed and new restrictions imposed on movement. Local notices outlining the presence of armed forces and limits on traffic circulated in the city, though no nationwide emergency measures have been formally announced.

In Sanandaj, residents reported an expanded security presence beginning earlier this week, including personnel they described as speaking Arabic rather than Persian.

Similar observations have been reported by sources in other western regions, though the identities and affiliations of the forces could not be independently verified.

Some protesters and observers alleged that forces affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including Afghan and Iraqi recruits, have been mobilized and organized at specific locations, including a mosque in Tehran’s Gholhak district.

Iranian authorities have not commented on these claims.

The proposed secondary tariffs were announced by President Donald Trump earlier this week in response to a violent crackdown on protesters in Iran.

Some commentators have questioned whether such measures could be enforced, pointing to Iran’s trade links with more than 140 countries. Others have focused on China’s open opposition, noting that Beijing is Iran’s largest trading partner.

Yet recent experience suggests that secondary tariffs can be far more damaging to the sanctioned country than to those doing business with it.

What past examples say?

A telling precedent is the United States’ action against India over its imports of Russian oil in late August last year. Although the mechanics differed, the effect became clear within months.

By late 2025, Russian crude was selling at discounts of up to $20 to $30 per barrel compared to discounts of around $3 per barrel in summer and $10 in autumn. Even at a discounted price, Russia’s oil exports to India fell by 29 percent in December compared with the previous month.

The pain, in short, was absorbed primarily by Russia, not India.

US Census Bureau data show that despite the imposition of 25 percent tariffs on Indian goods, India’s exports to the United States did not decline significantly. Cheap Russian oil helped Indian refiners remain competitive.

China’s experience tells a similar story. While Chinese exports to the United States fell by about 20 percent in 2025 under US tariffs, China’s total global exports grew by 5.5 percent. Supported by discounted Russian oil and gas, Beijing posted a record $1.2 trillion trade surplus.

Taken together, these cases suggest that secondary tariffs tend to extract concessions from the sanctioned exporter rather than meaningfully penalizing its trading partners.

How secondary tariffs on Iran would work?

Washington has yet to publish detailed guidance on how the proposed 25 percent tariff would be applied. Still, Trump’s public statements indicate that the measure would not be limited to countries purchasing Iranian crude oil.

As with its oil exports to China, Tehran would likely be forced to lower prices across a wide range of goods so that buyers can offset the cost of tariffs imposed on their exports to the United States.

Even if secondary tariffs were applied only to buyers of Iranian energy and petrochemical products, the impact would be severe.

According to data from the commodity intelligence firm Kpler, seen by Iran International, Iran currently exports around 1.3 million barrels per day of crude oil—almost all to China.

It also exports more than half that volume in refined petroleum products, primarily to the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Iraq, India, and Pakistan.

Annual revenues from liquefied petroleum gas exceed $10 billion, fuel oil generates roughly $7 billion, and gas exports about $5 billion. When petrochemical shipments are included, income from these products roughly matches Iran’s crude oil earnings.

Here, too, vulnerabilities are mounting.

Iran’s 25-year gas supply contract with Turkey is set to expire in five months, with no indication that Ankara intends to renew it. Gas deliveries to Iraq have also been halted because of domestic shortages, prompting Baghdad to seek alternative suppliers.

Tehran shouldering the costs

The United Arab Emirates—the largest buyer of Iranian fuel oil and a major importer of Iranian LPG—maintains extensive economic ties with the United States, making it unlikely to risk exposure to secondary tariffs.

Other Asian buyers, including India, Singapore, Malaysia, and Pakistan, import Iranian products in volumes too small to justify jeopardizing access to the US market.

The most likely outcome is that Iran will once again be pushed to rely overwhelmingly on China, offering steep discounts to preserve market share.

If implemented, secondary tariffs would not isolate Iran’s trading partners so much as narrow Iran’s options, deepen its dependence on a single buyer, and erode its earnings at a moment of acute domestic and fiscal strain.

In that sense, the policy may prove more damaging than conventional sanctions—by forcing Iran itself to absorb the cost of maintaining its already limited presence in the global economy.

Witnesses said security personnel entered medical centers, removed injured protesters for undisclosed locations and fired “finishing shots” at some of those left behind, describing scenes of bodies and wounded being loaded onto trucks without separation. Iran International could not independently verify the accounts.

Residents said the city fell into an uneasy calm on Monday after clashes on Thursday and Friday followed by two days of resistance by protesters over the weekend. Motorbike units and pickup trucks carrying security forces patrolled streets, while access to hospitals was heavily restricted, witnesses said.

A taxi driver who said he witnessed the violence near Gohardasht square on Thursday said security personnel loaded both dead and wounded protesters onto trucks. “The injured were not separated from the dead,” he said, adding that many were young people.

Families gathered outside hospitals including Kasra and Qassem Soleimani, where armed personnel blocked entrances and dispersed crowds, witnesses said.

At Behesht-e Sakineh cemetery, mourners reported restrictions on burials and said authorities halted the release of bodies to prevent public funerals.

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  Security forces blocked blood donations, seized wounded protesters - paper

Similar pressure on medical facilities was reported elsewhere.

In the northeastern city of Bojnourd, a nurse told Iran International that a local hospital had become heavily securitized, with normal shift schedules canceled and staff pressured to prioritize treatment for injured security personnel while protesters were turned away or left untreated.

Rights groups and media have reported security force raids on hospitals in other parts of Iran during the unrest, including incidents in the western city of Ilam.

The project aims to build a national network on a Huawei-based platform, doing work similar to services provided by Iranian cloud firm ArvanCloud (Abr Arvan) but on a far larger scale, the information said.

It is intended to host widely used public services as well as banking and payment platforms and other critical infrastructure.

Huawei did not respond to Iran International’s request for comment.

According to the information, the project is in its final stages and is being brought online under ArvanCloud’s management, through a company called Ayandeh Afzay-e Karaneh.

The project is linked to individuals and companies under US sanctions, including Fanap and its CEO Shahab Javanmardi – sanctioned by the US Treasury in August over alleged ties to Iran’s intelligence ministry and the Revolutionary Guards.

Sources said Huawei supplied the required equipment covertly, and the company’s name does not appear in related documentation.

President Masoud Pezeshkian visited the construction site of the project in March 2025. According to the sources, China’s ambassador also visited the project.

Sources said the project is estimated to cost between $700 million and $1 billion, and that all equipment – supplied by Huawei in China – entered Iran after the 12-day war, shipped in 24 containers.

Sources said the data center would have capacity for about 400 server racks and would incorporate ArvanCloud, with much of the country’s core digital infrastructure eventually moved to the site.

They said the data center is located beneath Fanap’s administrative building in Pardis IT Town, about 20 kilometers northeast of Tehran, in a place designed to be difficult to strike by missile.

Blackout continues

Iran has remained under sweeping internet and phone disruptions as protests continue, limiting reporting on casualties, according to rights groups and internet monitors.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said he was deeply disturbed by reports of violence during nationwide protests and expressed concern about internet and communications shutdowns, calling on authorities to restore access.

NetBlocks said on Wednesday that Iran remained largely offline as the nationwide blackout passed its 132nd hour, adding that limited connectivity was obscuring the scale of casualties.

Fars news agency, which is affiliated with the IRGC, argued that internet restrictions should continue as protests persist, linking the limits to what it described as security concerns.

Iran International has reported that, amid the communications shutdown, particularly on January 7 and 8, at least 12,000 protesters were killed.

Iranian government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said decisions on internet and phone cuts were outside the control of government ministries in a security situation.

Revolutions differ from episodic unrest not by the scale of any single demonstration, but by their structure and direction. They are sustained rather than spontaneous; cumulative rather than cathartic. Their power lies in endurance, in the gradual erosion of legitimacy, authority, and administrative control, until the system itself becomes untenable.

Compared with past protest waves, the current unrest appears more nationally synchronised, socially broad, and symbolically convergent. Equally significant is the re-emergence of a shared national language of opposition that Tehran has long sought to crush through ideology, patronage, and repression.

This matters because revolutions do not target the security apparatus alone. They strike at the regime’s ability to govern routinely. A state under revolutionary pressure must deploy coercion continuously rather than episodically. That is costly, exhausting, and politically corrosive.

Iranian police have circulated text messages warning families to keep young people and teenagers at home, citing the alleged presence of “terrorist groups” and armed individuals at demonstrations and threatening decisive action. The author has independently verified these messages.

Such warnings are not merely informational; they are designed to shift responsibility for state violence onto families themselves.

Yet repression alone does not explain the regime’s present fragility. For much of its rule, governance in the Islamic Republic has been hollowed out by a deeply entrenched kleptocratic system, in which political authority, security power, and economic privilege are fused.

Years of sanctions, chronic inflation, currency collapse, and fiscal mismanagement have hollowed out state capacity. Recent military setbacks have compounded internal strain. The result is a regime increasingly reliant on force at a moment when its economic and institutional resilience is at its weakest.

Mass killing

Iran International reported on Tuesday that at least 12,000 people had been killed in the recent protests, describing the crackdown as “the largest killing in Iran’s contemporary history.”

The emerging scale of violence therefore places Iran’s crisis under increasing strain within the framework of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P). When a state is credibly accused of mass killing, collective punishment, and systematic efforts to conceal casualties, its claim to sovereign non-intervention comes under acute pressure.

R2P does not mandate automatic military action, but it does impose an obligation on the international community to consider diplomatic, economic, legal, and—if atrocities escalate further—coercive measures.

In this sense, the internationalisation of Iran’s crisis would be the consequence of Tehran's own conduct, not foreign imposition.

In 2011, the UN Security Council invoked the Responsibility to Protect in Libya when the Gaddafi regime threatened mass atrocities during the Arab Spring. Western alliances have acted to prevent large-scale civilian harm even in the absence of an explicit UN mandate.

From Bosnia and Kosovo during the wars of the former Yugoslavia to Sierra Leone and parts of the Sahel, the underlying logic has been consistent: when states engage in or enable mass violence against civilians, sovereignty ceases to function as an absolute shield.

Trump’s intervention

It is in this context that US President Donald Trump’s increasingly explicit warnings to the Islamic Republic should be understood.

Earlier today, Trump issued a direct message to Iranian protesters on Truth Social, urging them to “KEEP PROTESTING–TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS,” announcing that he has cancelled all meetings with Iranian officials, and declaring that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY” if the killing of protesters does not stop.

This marks a notable escalation in both tone and signalling.

Trump has now repeatedly framed continued repression as a red line, stating that the United States will not tolerate mass killings of civilians.

It is unlikely that US planners would ignore the lessons of Israel’s recent 12-day campaign against Iran, a campaign in which American forces ultimately participated and which demonstrated both the reach and the limits of strikes narrowly focused on infrastructure.

Any strategy under consideration would likely be shaped less by symbolic targets than by the regime’s security architecture itself: the institutions, decision-making structures, and coercive networks that sustain repression.

Whether such pressure remains declaratory or translates into action, the signal is unmistakable: the regime’s own conduct has pushed the crisis beyond routine diplomacy and into active contingency planning.

Change in strategic terrain

The comparison most often drawn is with 2009. But the analogy is misleading.

The Green Movement was largely urban, middle-class, and procedural in its demands. It challenged an election outcome, not the foundational legitimacy of the system itself. The current movement contests the regime’s right to rule altogether.

Nor does this moment resemble many leaderless uprisings of the past century, which fractured under pressure or collapsed into ideological ambiguity. What distinguishes the present phase is the growing convergence around a figure and a direction.

Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah—whose reign ended in February 1979 following the revolution led by Ruhollah Khomeini—appears to be functioning, through popular recognition rather than formal appointment, as a focal point for disparate strands of opposition.

Whatever one’s view of monarchy, the presence of an identifiable political centre of gravity marks an important departure from previous cycles of unrest.

For now, the Islamic Republic retains formidable coercive capacity. Revolution does not guarantee swift collapse. What it does guarantee is a change in the strategic terrain.

The question is no longer whether the regime can suppress protests tonight, but whether it can sustain governance tomorrow, next month, or next year under unrelenting strain.