Lebanon has ordered the removal of billboards showing Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and his late father from the road to Beirut’s airport, turning a dispute over public posters into a test of who gets to define the country’s fragile post-ceasefire moment.
The billboards, installed this week along the route to Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport, carried the slogan “Thank you to loyal Iran.” They appeared days after a ceasefire was announced between Israel and Hezbollah as part of wider US-Iran negotiations, and as Lebanese and Israeli officials continued direct US-mediated talks over southern Lebanon.
Interior Minister Ahmad Hajjar said Thursday he had ordered the banners and posters removed within two days. Speaking on the sidelines of a Cabinet meeting, he said the decision was part of efforts to regulate public spaces and enforce existing laws.
But the timing gave the order wider political weight. Hezbollah and its allies have portrayed the ceasefire as proof of Iran-backed “resistance” leverage, while Lebanon’s government is trying to show that decisions over the country’s territory, security and public space still belong to the Lebanese state.
The airport road is one of Lebanon’s most visible political corridors. For years, posters and banners linked to Hezbollah, Amal and Iran-aligned figures have lined parts of the route into Beirut.
In 2022, Lebanon’s Tourism Ministry asked Hezbollah and Amal to remove billboards showing religious and political figures from the same road and replace them with signs promoting tourism.
The latest posters carried a sharper message. By thanking Iran days after the ceasefire, they presented Tehran not as an outside power in Lebanon’s war but as the loyal patron whose support helped shape the outcome.
That message comes as the ceasefire itself remains unsettled. Lebanese and Israeli officials have been engaged in US-mediated talks over southern Lebanon, including proposals for Israeli forces to hand some areas to the Lebanese army and for Hezbollah to be kept out of those zones.
Israel, however, has signaled it does not intend to leave southern Lebanon quickly. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel will remain in a southern security zone as long as required, while Defense Minister Israel Katz has said Israeli troops will not withdraw even under US pressure.
The ceasefire has also been strained by continued violence. Local and international reports have described Israeli strikes and gunfire in southern Lebanon since the truce was announced, while Hezbollah has accused Israel of violating the agreement.
Hezbollah, for its part, has rejected any settlement that resembles normalization with Israel. In a televised Ashura address on Friday, Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem said Israel must leave Lebanon “unconditionally” and said the group would accept no normalization, no end to hostility with Israel, no gains for Israel and no partial Israeli presence on Lebanese soil.
His remarks placed Hezbollah on a collision course with the logic of the US-mediated talks, which depend on a negotiated security arrangement in the south. They also reinforced the message carried by the airport road billboards: that Iran and Hezbollah see the ceasefire as part of a wider regional struggle, not merely a Lebanese border arrangement.
For Lebanon’s government, the posters created an immediate sovereignty problem. Leaving them in place would allow an Iran-Hezbollah victory message to dominate the country’s main international gateway at the very moment Beirut is trying to negotiate under its own authority.
Removing them, however, exposes the limits of that authority. The Lebanese state can clear a road, but it cannot easily resolve the deeper conflict behind the posters: Hezbollah’s weapons, Israel’s presence in the south, Iran’s role in the ceasefire and Washington’s attempt to keep Lebanon’s track separate from its broader deal with Tehran.
The index, produced for Iran in collaboration with Impact Iran, said torture remained deeply embedded in the country’s law, policy and practice, and warned that US and Israeli strikes on Iran during the June 2025 military escalation had further increased the risk of torture, ill-treatment and arbitrary detention.
The report said Iran scored at the most severe level on six of the index’s seven pillars: political commitment, police and institutional violence, impunity, victims’ rights, the right to defend human rights, and protection for all. It rated Iran as high-risk on conditions in detention.
It said Iran had not ratified the UN Convention against Torture, did not criminalize torture as a distinct offense, and continued to allow punishments such as flogging and amputation.
The report also cited the use of confessions in convictions, saying this created incentives for torture and ill-treatment to extract statements, including confessions later broadcast by state media.
It said at least 1,639 executions were recorded in Iran in 2025, including executions of people who were under 18 at the time of their alleged offenses.
The index also pointed to what it called near-total impunity, saying no independent body investigates torture allegations or deaths in custody, while overcrowded detention facilities operate with little or no outside oversight.
Women and girls, ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+ people, human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers face heightened risks of torture, arbitrary detention and other abuse, the report said.
“In Iran, torture is not a failure of the system – it is the system: written into law, rewarded by the courts, and concealed behind prison walls,” said Rose Richter, Impact Iran’s executive director.
Richter said security forces fired on civilians even inside hospitals during the crackdown of December 2025 and January 2026, when more than 50,000 people were arrested and more than 7,000 killed.
Other rights groups and monitoring organizations have previously reported higher figures for the crackdown, pointing out the difficulty of verifying casualties and arrests amid restrictions on access, intimidation of families and limited independent reporting inside Iran.
“Behind each of those numbers is a person whose suffering was deliberate, and a family still waiting for the truth,” Richter said.
Gerald Staberock, secretary general of OMCT, said the index was intended to turn “scattered warnings into evidence that cannot be ignored.”
“The Global Torture Index should be read by development agencies, but also by security actors and businesses seeking to engage or invest in the countries covered,” Staberock said.
OMCT urged Iran to halt executions and judicial corporal punishment, ratify the UN Convention against Torture, criminalize torture, end the use of coerced confessions and give the UN Fact-Finding Mission unhindered access.
Every serious economy watcher knows the ritual. At the start of each month, the purchasing managers’ indexes land, and markets move.
A PMI is the closest thing economics has to a pulse reading. Surveyors ask the people who run companies a simple set of questions about the month just ended: did production rise or fall, did new orders come in, are you hiring?
The answers are compressed into a number from 0 to 100. The 50 line separates growth from contraction. A few points below 50 signals trouble.
Readings under 40 usually belong to crises. When the index for US manufacturing fell to 41.5 in April 2020, with the country in lockdown, it made headlines for weeks.
A pulse reading below crisis level
Iran has a PMI too. Few outside the country have heard of it.
Since 2018, the research center of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce has surveyed managers of Iranian firms every month, following standard PMI methodology, and published the result under the Persian acronym Shamekh. The acronym is formed from Shakhes-e Modiran-e Kharid, literally “the index of purchasing managers.”
It is the instrument Iran’s own business establishment built to take the economy’s pulse. Official inflation statistics can be delayed, reweighted and narrated. A factory’s order book is harder to argue with.
That is what makes the latest readings so remarkable.
In March, the month war hit business conditions, Iran’s manufacturing Shamekh registered 26.2.
Some calibration is necessary, because the scale matters.
In April 2020, the cruelest month of the pandemic for many economies, Spain’s manufacturing PMI fell to 30.8. Britain’s fell to 32.6, its worst reading in roughly three decades. India, which confined 1.4 billion people to their homes, recorded 27.4, the lowest in that survey’s history.
Iran’s manufacturing sector in March came in below every one of them.
And the comparison flatters the situation, because those pandemic readings measured economies in a medically induced coma. Governments had deliberately and temporarily shut commerce down. Within months, every one of those indexes was back above 50.
No one switched Iran’s economy off to save lives.
Epic Fury may have concluded, but the economic fury continues. Judging by the latest figures, it is working. Iran’s industry is being suffocated by war, sanctions and the lingering effects of a naval blockade whose dismantling has now been promised but not yet proved in economic life.
The difference is the difference between a pause and a stroke.
Empty warehouses, falling orders
The 26.2 reading was never announced in a standalone report.
The chamber skipped its March publication. The figure surfaced quietly in a chart accompanying the April edition.
April itself brought no relief worth the name. Manufacturing stood at 37.4, while the whole-economy index was 38.5. Apart from March, these were the lowest readings in the survey’s history.
Iranian industry has now spent five consecutive months below the 50 line, meaning five straight months of contraction.
The Iranian New Year holidays, known as Nowruz, always slow business activity around late March and early April. Factories close, workers travel and early-spring readings often weaken. But the survey has eight Nowruz seasons on record, and none came anywhere near these levels.
Ten of the survey’s eleven components are below 50.
New orders, at 37.4, show demand drying up at home and in export markets alike. Delivery times, at 39.6, carry some of the report’s most telling explanations: internet shutdowns, broken payment channels and import restrictions.
Raw-material inventories stand at 32.6. That is not just a weak number; it is a warning about the physical ability to keep producing.
Here the chamber’s own language turns blunt. If conditions persist, it warns, production lines face partial or complete stoppage in the months ahead.
Employment, at 36.8, is the lowest in the survey’s history, even lower than during the war month itself. The layoffs did not end with the ceasefire. They are deepening.
One component points the other way, and it completes the picture.
The price of raw materials stands at 77.4, deep in inflationary territory. Iranian firms are producing less, selling less and paying more for what they buy.
Demonstrating stagflation usually requires setting two datasets side by side. Here, both halves sit on a single page of a single report, published by a single institution.
The costs are already passing through to households. Consumer prices rose nearly 9 percent in May. Not at an annual rate. In one month.
That is roughly what American consumers endured across the whole of 2022.
A 60-day clock factories may not have
What turns a bad snapshot into a worse forecast is the composition underneath.
For years, two sectors helped hold the index up: steel and petrochemicals. They are among Iran’s principal earners of hard currency, and they reliably scored above 50, pulling the average with them.
By the chamber’s own account, both were directly struck in the war.
Their weakness closes a loop. Fewer exports mean less foreign exchange. Less foreign exchange means scarcer and costlier imported inputs. Scarcer inputs mean still less production.
Set that loop beside the emptying warehouses, and beside a blockade that, by available estimates, has cost the economy on the order of $430 million a day. Even if the new memorandum begins to unwind it, the damage already done will not disappear on the day diplomats announce progress.
The component worth watching now is the quietest one: expectations of production for the month ahead.
It stands at 32.2, among the lowest readings the survey has ever produced. That question is about the future, answered by the people with the most direct knowledge of it and the least incentive for theater.
A memorandum now promises to change that future. A promise of the same kind preceded last year’s 12-day war in June 2025. Whether this one holds, or goes the way of that one, is the open question.
The agreement commits Washington to begin dismantling the blockade at once. But a signed page is not a furnace relit.
The talks in a Swiss resort started last week, and the 60 days the memorandum allots to reach a deal are, in the American president’s own telling, extendable by mutual consent.
Tehran has run this clock before. It is reportedly running it now over Lebanon.
At current inventories, the chamber’s surveyors warn, production lines face stoppage in the months ahead.
A government that spends its factories’ last quarter on a war beyond its borders has ranked its priorities. The managers who answered at 26 sit far down the list.
