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US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff said on Thursday he hoped tensions with Iran could be resolved through diplomacy, while warning that the alternative would be worse.
“I hope there’s a diplomatic resolution. I really do,” Witkoff said at a conference organized by the Israel-America Council in Florida.
He said Washington’s concerns centered on what he described as four main issues: nuclear enrichment, missile capabilities, stockpiles of enriched material and Iran’s regional proxies.
“There are four issues: nuclear enrichment, missiles – they have to cut back on their inventory – the actual material that they have, which is roughly 2,000 kilograms, which is enriched anywhere between 3.67% and 60, and the proxies, of course,” he said.
“If they want to come back to the League of Nations, we can solve those four problems diplomatically, and then that would be a great resolution,” he added. “And I think the alternative is a bad one.”
Witkoff also said the Trump administration had opened direct communications with Iranian officials amid concerns about possible mass executions.
“At his direction, we communicated with the Iranians yesterday,” he said. “One of the things we were concerned about were the killings that were rumored to be on the way – hangings, mass hangings – and that’s been shut down.”
He said Iran’s internal pressures could shape its next steps, citing what he described as power shortages, water scarcity and high inflation.
Iranian Oscar-winning filmmakers Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani called on the United States to take military action against Iran’s leadership, saying international intervention was a moral duty.
“International military intervention is not only a necessity; it is a moral responsibility,” they wrote in a guest column published this week on The Wrap .
They said Iranians could not remove what they described as a violent and illegitimate system on their own.
“Without decisive global support, the Iranian people cannot dismantle a regime that has made peaceful change impossible,” they added.
Activists rallied outside the Iranian embassy in Seoul on Friday, holding placards in support of anti-government protests in Iran and calling for an end to the killing of demonstrators.
Iran has entered what activists describe as the final stage of a plan to sharply restrict public access to the internet and place core communications under tighter security control, digital rights group Filterban said on Thursday.
The group said the project aimed to turn online access into what it called a government-controlled privilege, limited to people with high-level security clearance.
“This is the transition to a communications black hole,” Filterban said in its report, describing a system in which most users would lose access to open online services.
The group said authorities were working to upgrade deep packet inspection systems to detect and block Starlink and VPN traffic, while pushing private firms into tightly monitored internal messaging platforms.
Filterban said foreign technical partners had quietly exited parts of Iran’s telecom sector, signaling what it called the end of meaningful international cooperation in critical infrastructure.
“The era of public internet access in Iran is coming to an end,” the group said.
It warned that the measures were already hitting the economy, citing a collapse in e-commerce activity and supply chains after the latest shutdown.
Omid Nouripour, a vice president of the German parliament, called on Berlin to take what he described as immediate and tangible action against Iran’s leadership, citing the brutal crackdown on protests.
“Germany must act,” Nouripour wrote on X. “The brutal actions of the mullah regime require an immediate, noticeable response and must not go unpunished.”
He described Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as what he called the regime’s main tool of repression and urged the German government to ban the group as a terrorist organization.
Nouripour also called for a ban on its activities in Germany, the freezing of private assets of Iranian officials and Guards-linked figures, travel bans, and the severing of diplomatic ties with Tehran.
