Iran seals dozens of businesses in renewed hijab crackdown
Iranian authorities have sealed at least 42 cafés, restaurants, shops, sports clubs and other businesses across the country in the past three weeks, over compulsory hijab rules and what officials describe as violations of Islamic norms.
The figure is based on individual closure cases reported separately by state media and rights groups.
The closures were reported in at least 17 cities, including Tehran, Mashhad, Yazd, Kerman, Ardabil and Birjand, and affected cafés and restaurants, women's gyms, shops and a cultural center.
In just three weeks, the number of closures has already reached about 22% of the 191 cases HRANA documented over the entire previous Iranian calendar year.
File photo shows s motorist in Iran fills up a white SUV at a petrol station.
A plan to sell petrol at a much higher “refinery cost” rate in southern Kerman province was halted hours before it was due to begin, the provincial fuel distribution company said on Thursday.
The petrol was scheduled to go on sale from early Thursday at 872,000 rials ($0.47) per liter, Ahmad Salarifar, the manager of the National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company in Kerman, said.
The suspension, he said, followed a conversation between the provincial governor and national officials and was ordered so that a program on fuel consumption management and anti-smuggling measures could be examined further. Petrol will continue to be sold at existing rates until further notice, Salarifar said.
Monthly salaries for many Iranians are commonly put at around 200 million to 250 million rials ($108 to $134). Filling a typical 50-liter tank at the proposed price of 872,000 rials per litre would have cost 43.6 million rials ($23), a sum equivalent to roughly one-fifth of a monthly wage at the upper end of that range and more than 17 times the cost at the current 50,000-rial ($0.027) station-card rate.
Iran introduced a three-tier petrol pricing system in December 2025. Private cars initially received 60 litres at 15,000 rials ($0.008) and 100 litres at 30,000 rials ($0.016) each month, with any extra volume charged at 50,000 rials on a station card. The second subsidised tranche was later cut, leaving a total national quota of 110 litres while the two lower prices remained unchanged.
Plan halted hours before launch
Provincial authorities have not said how long the review will last or whether the higher price will be introduced later.
The suspension came only hours after Ali Asghar Zakeri-Harandi, the deputy governor of Kerman for civil affairs, announced that 204 filling stations in the province were ready to sell petrol at the “full refinery cost” rate.
The plan, he said, would take effect from early Thursday under national decisions by the country’s fuel headquarters. Neither the Oil Ministry nor the government has published details of the decision or how the 872,000-rial figure was calculated.
Motorists queue at a gas station in Iran.
Higher rate far exceeds current charges
The Kerman announcement came less than a month after government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said the government had no plan to change petrol prices. She repeated on July 28 that no final decision had been taken on the station-card rate and that any change would be announced officially.
A manager of a filling station in Kerman told Iran International that the provincial oil distribution office called stations on Wednesday evening to say the higher-priced petrol would start from early Thursday at selected sites.
A second call later the same night said the plan had been cancelled following talks with the regional oil company. The manager said the reversal was linked to concern over possible public reaction, adding that security forces normally present in the province had been redeployed elsewhere and that the higher price was still expected to be introduced soon.
Sudden fuel price increases have triggered major unrest in the past. In November 2019, an overnight rise of 50 percent on the subsidized quota and up to 300 percent on volumes above it sparked protests across more than 100 cities. Rights groups documented hundreds of deaths in the subsequent crackdown, and a near-total internet shutdown was imposed for several days.
Provincial officials have not clarified whether the Kerman plan was a local pilot or part of a wider national test. Its abrupt suspension before launch has left unanswered questions about the legal basis, the method used to set the price, and the government’s longer-term approach to reducing fuel subsidies.
Iranian authorities have sealed at least 42 cafés, restaurants, shops, sports clubs and other businesses across the country in the past three weeks, over compulsory hijab rules and what officials describe as violations of Islamic norms.
The figure is based on individual closure cases reported separately by state media and rights groups.
The closures were reported in at least 17 cities, including Tehran, Mashhad, Yazd, Kerman, Ardabil and Birjand, and affected cafés and restaurants, women's gyms, shops and a cultural center.
In just three weeks, the number of closures has already reached about 22% of the 191 cases HRANA documented over the entire previous Iranian calendar year.
Cafés, shops and gyms targeted
Among the latest cases, an optician in Qaen was sealed on Wednesday after authorities said customers and employees had failed to comply with compulsory hijab rules.
The Yin Yang café in Khomein was sealed over what authorities described as "improper hijab" and Instagram content, while a women's clothing store called Shabnam Maison in Kerman was also shut.
A café-restaurant in Tehran's Velenjak district was sealed a day earlier. Authorities in Ardabil also closed three coffee shops and arrested 16 people in connection with the businesses.
Hossein Salari, Ardabil's deputy prosecutor, said inspections of cafés would increase and authorities would act against shops selling clothing that he described as contrary to Islamic law or harmful to "public chastity."
Three cafés in Mashhad, Bojnourd and Birjand were sealed on August 10. Authorities also shut the Zhovan café in Minudasht on August 9 and the Arghavan café-bookstore in Mashhad on August 5.
The enforcement has extended beyond cafés. Two sports clubs in Borujerd were sealed by judicial order on August 4, while authorities shut a Shahr-e Ketab bookstore in Babol the same day.
Four women's sports clubs were also sealed in Yazd, while authorities in Abadeh shut five businesses and arrested a café operator.
In Dezful, the local prosecutor announced the closure of 15 cafés and hookah lounges on July 23.
Enforcement rises sharply in Mashhad
Authorities have used terms including failure to observe compulsory hijab, "violations of norms," failure to observe "Islamic standards," and promotion of indecency to explain the closures.
Some businesses have also faced other accusations. Authorities in Ardabil cited alleged gambling and promotion of corruption among the reasons for closing three cafés.
One café in Mashhad was cited for issues including failing to list matcha on its price list and selling cakes and desserts without required health certification. Police described the alleged violations at four women's gyms in Yazd only as "disciplinary offenses."
Official figures from Mashhad point to a sharp rise in closures.
Mohsen Sayadi, the city's head of trade inspection and supervision, said authorities sealed 104 businesses during the first four months of the current Iranian year, which began on March 21, compared with five during the same period a year earlier - an increase of about twentyfold.
Friends gathered at a cafe in Tehran to watch a match together.
Pressure extends to social media
The enforcement has also extended online.
HRANA said that between July 11 and August 1, authorities sealed at least 23 businesses, blocked or seized at least 72 social media pages and accounts, and required the operators of 21 pages to publish statements pledging compliance.
Those affected included bloggers, content creators, athletes, artists, fashion and beauty workers, online businesses, travel agencies and cafés.
HRANA also reported that authorities had identified and removed 56 Instagram pages in Qazvin and deleted 3,258 pieces of content from social media pages belonging to 32 businesses in Rasht.
Businesses face wider pressure
The closures come as businesses are also struggling with falling purchasing power and broader economic pressure.
Iranian authorities have previously sealed businesses that joined strikes, supported anti-government protests or did not enforce compulsory hijab, including during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests and demonstrations earlier this year.
Many Iranian women have increasingly appeared in public without the mandatory headscarf since 2022, while authorities have continued to use business closures and action against social media accounts to enforce compulsory hijab rules.
Iran International's reporter Negar Mojtahedi during an interview
Iran International's Negar Mojtahedi has won Canada's 2026 Bill Good Award, part of the Jack Webster honors regarded as western Canada's preeminent journalism awards, cited for reporting that bridged the gulf between the West and Iran, often at risk to her own safety.
"Reporting on war, state violence and human rights violations, often at great risk to her personal safety, Negar has helped bridge the gulf between the West and Iran and increased cultural understanding," the Jack Webster Foundation said in announcing the award.
The foundation also praised Mojtahedi, a first-generation immigrant, for challenging negative stereotypes and serving as a role model for journalists seeking more equitable representation of their communities.
The Bill Good Award was created to mark the retirement of its namesake, one of Canada's most trusted broadcast voices, after a 50-year career spanning CTV, CKNW and CBC. Unlike the foundation's juried categories, its recipient is chosen directly by the board, and past honorees have been drawn from the country's most established newsrooms, from CBC to the Vancouver Sun.
"No other award in Western Canadian journalism instills a sense of pride greater than a Webster," the foundation says of its honors.
Mojtahedi is an investigative reporter, documentary filmmaker and host of Eye for Iran, Iran International's weekly English-language podcast, based in British Columbia.
The award caps a run of international recognition for the network and its journalists stretching back less than two years.
Last year, the Transatlantic Leadership Network in Washington presented Mojtahedi its Freedom of the Media Award for excellence in international reporting, an honor whose past recipients include the Iranian dissident journalist Masih Alinejad; Iran International was recognized at the same ceremony.
In May, the network took four top prizes at the 2026 WAN-IFRA Digital Media Awards Middle East, run by the World Association of News Publishers, including two for a secure Telegram bot that lets Iranians submit verified footage and reports from inside the country, alongside awards for its interactive map of the 12-day war and its Woman, Life, Freedom coverage. The bot advanced to the global stage of the competition, where the network placed among the Middle East's top-performing organizations.
The same month, Art of Resistance, a short documentary produced by the network's parent company Volant Media and directed by Iran International correspondent Mehran Abbassian, won Best Short Documentary at the Swedish Cinema House Film Festival, with Abbassian named Best Director.
The Webster foundation also named Surrey Now-Leader journalist Tom Zytaruk the recipient of the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award and CBC producer Anne Penman the recipient of the Shelley Fralic Award.
The honors will be presented at the Webster Awards gala in Vancouver on November 2.
FILE PHOTO: Mohsen Rezaei at a farewell ceremony for Iran's late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, July 3, 2026.
Mohsen Rezaei’s appointment as Iran’s new security chief has opened a battle over its political meaning, with ultra-hardliners portraying the removal of his predecessor as evidence that the balance in Tehran has shifted against advocates of negotiations with Washington.
Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei appointed Rezaei as his representative on the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), after which President Masoud Pezeshkian named him secretary of the body at the center of Iran’s security and foreign policy decision-making.
Rezaei replaces Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr after only about five months in the job, an unusually short tenure for a position whose previous occupants typically served for years.
Opponents of negotiations have welcomed the change and sought to link Zolghadr’s departure to disagreements surrounding the ceasefire, negotiations with Washington and the Islamabad memorandum.
Reformist and government-aligned voices have cautioned against concluding that the harder-line camp has prevailed.
A battle over Zolghadr’s departure
Raja News, an outlet associated with the ultra-hardline Paydari camp, said Zolghadr’s replacement showed that, contrary to claims by supporters of negotiations, “not everything was coordinated with the Supreme Leader.”
Amir-Hossein Sabeti, a hardline member of parliament and prominent critic of negotiations, went further, accusing Pezeshkian of resisting the Supreme Leader’s wishes over replacing Zolghadr with Rezaei.
He warned the president that unless he changed course and followed the leader’s direction, “the people will replace him.”
Accounts circulating among hardliners have claimed that Pezeshkian initially resisted appointing Rezaei as SNSC secretary and did so only after Khamenei named Rezaei as his representative on the council.
No official explanation has been given for Zolghadr’s departure, and the claims do not establish that disagreements over negotiations caused his removal.
The reformist-leaning Rouydad24 website said opponents of negotiations were seeking to build a political narrative around the reshuffle: that divisions had emerged during the ceasefire and negotiations and that the balance had now shifted toward the harder-line faction.
Nour News, which is considered close to the SNSC, also said Rezaei’s appointment could signal “the beginning of a new approach to the country’s strategic governance,” but rejected attempts to portray it as evidence of a confrontation between Pezeshkian’s government and the leadership.
Rezaei’s record fuels hardline hopes
Rezaei’s own previous statements have added to speculation over what his appointment could mean for negotiations.
Ultra-hardliners have recirculated comments in which he interpreted an earlier message from Mojtaba Khamenei saying that “in principle, I had a different view” of the path taken by the SNSC.
Rezaei said the phrase meant “the path he had in mind was better than the path taken by the Supreme National Security Council,” remarks critics of the Islamabad memorandum have cited as evidence that Khamenei had reservations about the council’s approach.
But Rezaei has not opposed negotiations outright.
In an earlier interview with the Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA), he said talks should take place but argued against maintaining a ceasefire while they continued, saying a pause in fighting would give the enemy an opportunity to rebuild its forces.
The distinction suggests the emerging argument may be less about whether to negotiate than about the conditions under which talks take place and the role of military pressure alongside diplomacy.
What comes next
The conservative Farhikhtegan newspaper similarly argued against reducing the choice to either concessions or continued war.
It criticized those who believe the conflict could be turned into peace through concessions, including handing over management of the Strait of Hormuz, but also those who view the conflict solely through a military lens and see war as the only solution.
Hesamoddin Ashena, a former adviser to President Hassan Rouhani, meanwhile appeared to caution against the risks of miscalculation at the SNSC without explicitly naming Rezaei.
“Because you are not allowed even one analytical mistake, you must be very careful,” he wrote on X. “Because a nation will pay the cost of your mistake, you must be very careful.”
For now, Rezaei’s appointment has become a proxy for the larger argument over Iran’s direction.
Ultra-hardliners see Zolghadr’s departure as evidence that the political ground has shifted toward them, but Rezaei’s own record points to a more complicated position: support for negotiations combined with a greater emphasis on maintaining military pressure while they take place.
Piles of historic cobblestones torn from central Tehran’s streets sit stacked beside traffic.
Tehran's municipality is tearing up the cobblestones of the capital's historic pedestrian zones and laying asphalt, a change officials call traffic management and that architects and urban sociologists read as something older: the redesign of a city to make protest harder.
The work, underway in District 12, Baharestan Square and 30 Tir Street, is presented by municipal officials as a routine measure to ease congestion, carried out at the request of the traffic police.
Critics in architecture and urban sociology argue it cannot be read as a merely technical decision, and belongs instead to a long historical tradition: the use of urban design as an instrument of control.
When the city takes away the barricade
The link between redrawing a city's body and engineering its security is not new. Its most famous case is the great reconstruction of nineteenth-century Paris, carried out by Baron Haussmann on the orders of Napoleon III.
Until the 1850s, Paris was a city of narrow, winding, organic streets that let protesting citizens pry up the paving stones, throw up barricades and take control of their own neighborhoods, the world Victor Hugo drew so vividly in Les Misérables.
By demolishing the old fabric and driving broad, straight, uniform boulevards through it, Haussmann pursued two entwined goals: to strip the public of the ability to barricade the streets, and to ease the rapid movement of troops and heavy artillery for the suppression of unrest.
Later theorists built the insight into the foundations of urban thought. Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project and David Harvey in his work on the "right to the city" traced how space itself becomes a tool for reproducing ruling power and erasing the protester's presence from it.
Physical disarmament of public space
The replacement of segmented paving blocks with continuous asphalt functions, in effect, as the physical disarmament of the urban environment. Unlike uniform asphalt, cobblestones can be pried loose in a street confrontation, handing demonstrators ready material for barricades or for holding back advancing security forces.
Beyond removing potential projectiles, the smooth surface answers the operational needs of motorized units. Pedestrian infrastructure, with its uneven paving, varying widths, benches and street furniture, slows vehicles down. Coating these zones in asphalt creates uninterrupted corridors for special forces, water cannons and high-speed motorcycle patrols.
Pedestrians stroll along a cobblestone walkway in central Tehran.
Eradicating gathering points
The repaving projects coincide with heightened enforcement against public gathering spaces in central districts, including the sealing of outdoor cafes and the removal of street furniture.
Pedestrian-friendly designs naturally create pause points where citizens congregate, engage in conversation, and form initial nodes of public assembly.
Converting pedestrian hubs into vehicular thoroughfares prioritizes rapid transit over civic presence, reshaping central public areas into channels designed for continuous traffic flow.
The removal of seating and outdoor dining areas reinforces this operational shift by eliminating physical spaces that encourage citizens to linger.
Reclaiming the street
Public thoroughfares have consistently served as primary arenas for civil expression during periods of political tension in Iran.
Highlighting the symbolic and practical weight of public space, prominent Iranian actress Hedieh Tehrani addressed security forces in a public message during the 2022 nationwide protests, writing, "My only way of communicating with the people is the street."
Similarly, exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi emphasized the importance of public thoroughfares during his calls for widespread demonstrations in January 2026, framing the reclamation of street spaces as a central objective for people.
Replacing historical pedestrian infrastructure with asphalt prioritizes security deterrence and vehicular velocity over civic life and urban heritage. By converting public gathering hubs back into high-speed transit corridors, municipal authorities reduce public space from a venue for civic engagement into an infrastructure designed to prevent assembly.
