Food distribution and access to basic supplies have been disrupted in parts of Tehran’s Evin prison following US and Israeli airstrikes, with some detainees reporting they are surviving on limited bread and water, according to families who spoke to Iran International.
Relatives said prison wards have been locked down and some staff have left their posts as explosions from strikes in Tehran continue to be heard around the clock.
Families said food distribution and cooking supplies in the women’s ward and Ward 7 had been halted, leaving inmates with only small quantities of bread. The prison store has also been closed since the attacks began, preventing detainees from purchasing additional food.
Some prisoners who managed to contact relatives said they had access only to “dry bread and water,” raising concerns about how long supplies could last.
In a letter from Evin prison, jailed human rights activist Reza Khandan wrote that thousands of detainees were being held while facing the risk of ongoing bombardment and that many services inside prisons had been disrupted. He warned that continued conflict could lead to shortages of food rations and hygiene supplies.
Khandan said responsibility for the safety of prisoners lies with Iran’s judiciary and the prison organization.
A campaign supporting political prisoner Varisheh Moradi also called for the immediate release of detainees, particularly political prisoners, saying their safety could not be guaranteed under wartime conditions.
Separately, the United Nations has raised concerns about the situation inside Iran following the escalation of the conflict.
A spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said at least 787 people had been killed in Iran in the strikes, and expressed concern about civilian casualties, domestic repression, internet disruptions and the situation of political prisoners.
The UN also urged Iranian authorities to guarantee fundamental freedoms in line with international human rights law and called for the restoration of internet access, warning that communication outages could limit people’s access to vital safety information during wartime.
Evin prison in northern Tehran, known for holding political prisoners and activists, was hit during airstrikes on June 23 in last year’s 12-day war, damaging parts of the complex and raising concern about detainee safety.
Iran’s judiciary said at the time 71 people were killed, including guards, staff, inmates, visiting relatives, and nearby residents.
York Regional Police said officers responded shortly after 3 a.m. on March 1 to reports of gunfire at a commercial plaza north of Toronto, where investigators found damage consistent with multiple rounds fired at a business. The building was unoccupied at the time and no injuries were reported.
Surveillance footage shows a suspect dressed in dark clothing exiting a dark-colored sport utility vehicle before fleeing the scene, police said.
The targeted business, Saliwan Boxing, is owned by Salar Gholami, an Iranian-Canadian political activist and Canadian cruiserweight boxing champion who has organized demonstrations against the Islamic Republic across the Greater Toronto Area in recent months.
The shooting came hours after supporters gathered at the gym and elsewhere in Toronto following US and Israeli military strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, events that drew large crowds waving Iran’s Lion and Sun flag.
“Seventeen bullets in the middle of Toronto,” Gholami told Iran International. “This is not just about the Iranian community anymore. It’s about Canadians.”
Gholami said the gym is used by families, teenagers and children and could have been occupied when the shots were fired.
“Our gym is just a regular gym. Girls, teenagers, kids,” he said. “The shooting at the gym... is so dangerous.”
He said he believes the attack may have been intended as a warning linked to his activism, though police said no motive has been confirmed.
York Regional Police acknowledged concerns within the community that the incident could be connected to broader geopolitical tensions in the Middle East.
Investigators said they are working with policing and intelligence partners and reviewing all available evidence, including the possibility of politically motivated or transnational elements.
Canadian intelligence officials have previously warned that Iranian state actors and their proxies have targeted dissidents abroad, including individuals living in Canada. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has said it has disrupted potentially lethal threats linked to foreign interference operations in past cases.
Former Canadian Justice minister Irwin Cotler, for example, was previously the subject of an alleged Iranian plot to kill him on Canadian soil.
Gholami said he has remained in contact with police following the shooting but expressed concern about security arrangements, saying he was told additional protection would need to be arranged privately.
“We came here for freedom,” he said. “Canada must protect its citizens. I’m Canadian too.”
Despite the attack, he said he intends to continue organizing demonstrations.
“I will not give up,” Gholami said. “They may be able to take my life, but they cannot take our honor.”
Iran International contacted Public Safety Canada to ask whether additional protections are being considered for Iranian-Canadian activists amid concerns about transnational repression. The department did not respond before publication.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on Saturday morning in US and Israeli air strikes. On Tuesday, according to exclusive information obtained by Iran International, Iran’s Assembly of Experts, under pressure from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), chose his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as the next Supreme Leader. The decision has not been made public and is expected to be announced after Ali Khamenei is buried.
This is not a routine succession. It is a wartime decision shaped by the security state, and it raises serious questions about constitutional procedure. The priority appears to be speed and control, as the Islamic Republic faces attacks from outside and a leadership vacuum at the top.
Why the IRGC pushed Mojtaba
The IRGC needed two things at the same time: control and legitimacy.
Control means keeping the chain of command intact, preventing splits at the top, keeping the security forces coordinated, and stopping a scramble for power. In this crisis, the IRGC’s first priority is internal stability.
Legitimacy matters too, but not in a broad national sense. It means legitimacy inside the regime’s core base: hard-line politicians, the security institutions, and the loyal networks that still see the Islamic Republic as “their” state. In that narrow world, Mojtaba has something others do not. He can claim direct continuity with Khamenei, and the core base can accept him without feeling the system has broken.
That combination is why the IRGC chose him.
Mojtaba also has long-standing ties to the IRGC, going back decades, and deep relationships across its command networks. For years, he has been a key channel between his father and the Guard’s leadership. That gives him a rare position. He is close to the security core, but also linked to the civilian and clerical leadership that depends on it.
He has also effectively run the Supreme Leader’s office, the Beit, for at least the past two decades, and is widely seen as Ali Khamenei’s closest confidant. The Beit is not just a state within the state. It is the core of the state itself. In practice, Iran’s elected government and president are often a façade, with little real power. Real authority has long sat in the Beit, which controls key security, political and financial levers. That is why this apparatus is now protecting itself, and why it does not want an outsider coming in and taking control.
The Islamic Republic at a fork in the road
The Islamic Republic now faces two broad directions.
One is to keep fighting, stay defiant, absorb more damage, and try to outlast the attacks. That would likely mean tighter internal control, the dispersal of forces and assets, and heavier reliance on asymmetric pressure, including missiles, drones, proxies, and covert operations, while signalling that the state will not negotiate under fire.
The other is to step back and accept major concessions to stop the war and reduce pressure. That would mean giving up key pillars of Iran’s regional and military posture in return for a halt to attacks and some easing of pressure.
Mojtaba is well placed to pursue either path.
If the system chooses a bitter deal, it needs someone who can own it and stop the hardcore from turning on the leadership. If it chooses to fight on, it needs someone who can keep the IRGC united and keep the security state functioning under sustained attack. That is the political function of this succession.
The main question now is whether Israel and the US will target him immediately or give him time to make that choice. If they strike him straight away, it will be hard to avoid one conclusion: the campaign is no longer about pressure or deterrence. It is about regime change. If they hold back, the focus shifts to Mojtaba’s next move, and whether he chooses escalation or a climbdown.
The problem of blood and revenge
Any agreement with Donald Trump was always difficult for Ali Khamenei. In Tehran’s narrative, Trump sought Iran’s “surrender” and had the blood of Qasem Soleimani on his hands. Khamenei repeatedly ruled out reconciliation and called for qisas, a concept in Islamic law meaning retribution, often understood as “life for life.”
For his successor, the burden is heavier. Trump now carries not only Soleimani’s blood, but also Ali Khamenei’s. That makes any compromise far harder to sell, and it also raises the domestic stakes for any decision to escalate.
Mojtaba has one advantage inside the system. He can present himself as the person entitled to decide what comes next. If the leadership chooses to fight on, he can frame it as continuity, duty, and retaliation. If it chooses to pause revenge and prioritise survival, he can frame it as a decision made by the heir and the family, not as a humiliation forced from the outside.
Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder and first Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, set the guiding rule in a line that has the force of a fatwa in Shia political doctrine: “Preserving the system is the highest duty.” In plain terms, it means the survival of the Islamic Republic comes before almost everything else. As vali-e dam, the next of kin with the right to demand retribution, Mojtaba can argue that he also has the right to set it aside if the state’s survival requires it. That is how he can ask the regime’s core base to accept restraint, and present it not as retreat, but as obedience to a higher obligation.
What stepping back would mean in practice
If Mojtaba chooses regime survival over confrontation, the price will be high. A serious de-escalation would likely mean accepting Trump’s demands, including:
For Mojtaba, accepting these would not just be a policy shift. It would mean dismantling his father’s 37-year legacy in a single afternoon.
Without real and verifiable change in these areas, the US and Israel would have little reason to stop.
Even then, a deal would not solve the regime’s deeper problem at home. Legitimacy inside Iranian society is badly damaged, especially after the January massacre, and the state is widely seen as corrupt, incompetent, and violent. A ceasefire might stop the bombs, but it would not stop the political decay.
Where this leaves the Islamic Republic
If Mojtaba keeps the hard line while the world’s most powerful military is striking alongside the region’s most capable one, the window for a new leader to consolidate may be measured in days, not months.
If he chooses a climbdown, the war may stop, but the inheritance remains bleak. He would be taking ownership of painful concessions that undo much of his father’s legacy, while inheriting a state that is badly broken. The Islamic Republic is facing something close to a failed-state reality: an economy in severe distress, hollowed-out institutions, and public hostility so high that normal governance becomes hard to sustain. A halt in attacks would not restore capacity, trust, or authority.
Either way, Mojtaba Khamenei begins in the ruins of his father’s world. The Islamic Republic’s options are all expensive, its survival is no longer guaranteed, and for the first time in forty years, time is the one thing Tehran cannot buy.
“The United States Munitions Stockpiles have, at the medium and upper medium grade, never been higher or better,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The US, he wrote, has “a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons” and that “Wars can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully, using just these supplies.”
His remarks came after CNN and The Wall Street Journal reported concerns about the pace at which key US munitions are being consumed in the escalating war with Iran.
Meanwhile, Washington sustains both offensive strikes and defensive intercept operations across the region. US systems, including Patriot and THAAD batteries deployed in Israel and neighboring states, have been heavily engaged in countering Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks.
CNN reported on Monday that US reserves of certain missile systems – including Tomahawk land-attack missiles and SM-3 interceptors – are under strain amid sustained operations.
The Wall Street Journal also wrote Sunday that as the US planned operations against Iran, the military’s top general raised concerns about munitions stockpiles, particularly air defense interceptors needed to counter Iranian ballistic missiles and drones targeting regional sites hosting US forces.
Trump, in a separate post on Tuesday, called The Wall Street Journal report a “disgrace” on Truth Social, saying the United States has “unlimited mid to upper tier Weaponry – Brutal ‘stuff.’”
Iran’s arsenal under pressure
Trump told Politico on Tuesday that Iran was running out of crucial armaments.
“They’re running out and they’re running out of areas to shoot them, because they’re being decimated,” Trump said. “They’re running out of launchers.”
The New York Times reported Sunday, citing Israeli military officials, that Israeli airstrikes carried out since June last year have destroyed roughly 200 Iranian ballistic missile launchers and disabled dozens more – amounting to about half of Iran’s operational launcher fleet.
Israeli strikes, according to the report, during both the current offensive and last summer’s 12-day campaign also hit Iran’s primary explosives production facility. That complex provides key components for missile warheads and supports weapons programs including rockets, drones and cruise missiles.
Before last year’s assault, Israeli intelligence had assessed that Iran possessed approximately 3,000 ballistic missiles and was seeking to dramatically expand output, potentially reaching 8,000 missiles by 2027.
A Defense Express analysis on Tuesday said that as of Monday, Iran had launched at least 771 ballistic missiles at neighboring countries and Israel since the start of the conflict.
The figure is not definitive, as totals vary by reporting country and strikes remain ongoing. Defense Express noted that different states have published their own counts while Iran continues firing missiles, and Tehran has not released an official tally of launches.
Despite damage inflicted during the earlier campaign, The New York Times reported that Iran has attempted to rebuild its missile manufacturing capacity, with recent estimates suggesting output of dozens of missiles per month. The newspaper added that Iran has also sought components from abroad to restore its surface-to-surface missile arsenal.
