US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth rejected a CNN report that said the US military depleted nearly 80% of its THAAD missile interceptors during the Iran conflict.
"That banner is NOT TRUE, CNN. Shame on you," Hegseth wrote on X on Tuesday, adding "We don’t hate the Fake News media enough."
As executions have accelerated in recent weeks, some Iranian social media users have increasingly portrayed the pre-dawn adhan as a reminder of hangings rather than the beginning of the day’s religious observances.
The adhan is the Islamic call summoning Muslims to the five daily prayers.
Iranian regulations state that death sentences should ordinarily be carried out at sunrise unless the court specifies another time. Executions are nevertheless widely associated with the early-morning hours, when prisoners’ families and supporters often wait for news as the dawn call to prayer is broadcast.
Social media anger turns toward religious symbols
Posts criticizing Islam and religious symbols circulated across Instagram and X following the latest executions.
An Instagram user wrote that the dawn adhan had become “a symbol and reminder of the execution of this country’s youth,” adding that a call intended to invite people to worship, peace and salvation had instead become associated with taking lives.
Activist Masih Alinejad wrote after clashes outside an execution site that the dawn call to prayer had become “only a symbol of death and execution.”
Another Instagram user wrote before planned executions in Isfahan that the young prisoners were due to be hanged “to the sound of the dawn call to prayer,” adding that it now carried “only the smell of death.”
Other users went further, posting profanity directed at Islam, the Quran, Shi’ite religious figures, the adhan and the Arbaeen pilgrimage. Some wrote that they no longer associated the dawn call with prayer but with executions.
IRGC-linked campaign urges crackdown
The IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency said more than 700 people had signed a campaign on its platform by Tuesday, calling for the “maximum punishment” of those accused of “insulting Islamic sanctities online.”
Organizers cited Article 513 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code and urged judicial and security authorities to take what they described as “effective and deterrent” action.
Under Article 513, insulting Islamic sanctities is punishable by between one and five years in prison. Cases classified as sabb al-nabi, or insulting the Prophet, can carry the death penalty.
Fars said campaign supporters called for tougher enforcement against people who “deliberately insult Islamic sanctities” online and urged authorities to prosecute offenders under existing legislation.
Judiciary spokesman Asghar Jahangir has previously said Iran continuously monitors cyberspace through a dedicated unit within the prosecutor general’s office and urged citizens to report alleged online offenses through official channels.
The campaign adds to broader efforts by Iranian authorities to tighten oversight of online speech as criticism over the recent executions continues to spread across social media.
Pezeshkian could not see the man beside him and later asked whether the voice he had heard had really belonged to the supreme leader, according to the sources.
Their account of the only known meeting between Pezeshkian and the Islamic Republic’s third supreme leader differs sharply from the version the president has told in public.
In mid-May, Pezeshkian told a gathering of trade association representatives that he had spent two and a half hours with the new leader “in a cordial atmosphere.” Iran International’s sources said the encounter lasted only a few minutes, after which the president was asked to leave.
The meeting itself was a concession extracted under pressure. Khamenei's office agreed to it only after repeated requests from Pezeshkian and his threat to resign, the sources said, and the president was informed that, contrary to standard practice, he would not be received at the leader's usual residence.
Instead, his security detail delivered him to an undisclosed location somewhere in Tehran. There he was taken from his own vehicle and seated in the back of a commercial car with tinted windows, where, apparently, Khamenei was already waiting. The spot was dark enough that the two men could not see each other, and Khamenei's guards did not permit a handshake. The conversation was carried entirely by voice.
The treatment reportedly angered Pezeshkian, who regarded it as humiliating. According to individuals in the president's office, he later asked whether the person beside him had in fact been the supreme leader, since he had only heard a voice in the dark.
It is unclear whether the remark was an expression of anger or genuine doubt. Pezeshkian has since requested a second meeting, this time at the leader's residence. The request has so far been denied.
A leader nobody sees
The president's uncertainty lands in a country that has neither seen nor heard its new ruler. In the roughly five months since the Assembly of Experts selected Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his father, not a single audio recording or video of him has been released.
The silence has become a subject inside Iran's own state-aligned press. On Sunday, the website of the Hamshahri newspaper published a short video claiming that foreign intelligence services could trace any audio recording of the new leader and locate his hideout by measuring acoustic energy, analyzing the frequency signature of the electrical grid and examining background noise. The video added that spy agencies could analyze vocal-tract resonances to determine the extent of his injuries or anxiety, a claim that fed rather than calmed speculation about his condition.
The world's assessments diverge just as sharply. Three weeks ago, US President Donald Trump put the odds that Mojtaba Khamenei had been killed at 90 percent. Israel's prime minister recently said he is alive.
Even the government's own senior figures do not tell one story. "I have not seen Mojtaba Khamenei during this period, and only a limited number of people have met with him," Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a July interview with the online program The Story of the War. One day later, Pezeshkian said in a speech that the number of meetings with the leader had increased.
A resignation he cannot repeat
The strain between the president and the leader's office has since spilled into the open. In a video circulated on social media on Monday, Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi, a Khamenei family relative by marriage, said the new leader has formally warned that Pezeshkian's next resignation, after 28 threats or attempts, will be his last.
"He declared it officially," Kharrazi said, "and that is why they packed up, turned down the wick, and stopped threatening to resign."
The warning matches Iran International's earlier reporting. A knowledgeable source said in late May that Pezeshkian had sent a formal letter to the leader's office asking to step down, a resignation driven by what the president described as the Revolutionary Guards' complete control over the running of the country.
A president who cannot resign, then, serves a leader he cannot see. Five months into the new reign, Mojtaba Khamenei remains unseen, unheard and unrecorded, a ruler his own president has met exactly once, in the dark, and still cannot be certain he has met at all.
