Iranians are victims of authorities’ choices, UN Security Council president says

“The government of the Republic of Peru has decided to sever diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the Foreign Ministry said.

Lima cited what it described as Iran’s repression of peaceful protests, restrictions on press freedom, discrimination against women and girls, and persecution of political opponents.

“Within the framework of its firm commitment to defending democracy, a fundamental principle of its foreign policy, Peru has observed with growing concern the deterioration of democracy in Iran, as documented by various United Nations mechanisms, particularly regarding the repression of peaceful protests, violations of press freedom, discrimination against women and girls, and the persecution of political opponents,” read the statement.

The ministry said Iranian restrictions and disruptions to international trade through Hormuz since March violated freedom of navigation, harmed energy markets and threatened global supply chains.

“The government of Peru views with deep concern the severe restrictions imposed by the Iranian regime, as well as the disruption of international trade through the Strait of Hormuz since March 2026, because they contravene principles such as freedom of navigation and the right of passage through straits used for international maritime transit, which cannot be subject to unilateral conditions, while also affecting navigational safety, the protection of human life at sea and the preservation of the marine environment, in addition to their repercussions for energy prices and the stability of global supply chains,” the foreign ministry said.

Lima also linked the diplomatic rupture to broader security concerns, accusing Tehran of fueling regional violence and denying UN nuclear inspectors’ access to facilities needed to verify that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons.

“The government of Peru also strongly rejects Iran’s incitement to violence and the escalation of conflicts in the Middle East, as well as its obstruction of the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” it said.

Peru will maintain consular relations to protect the two countries’ citizens and interests. The decision was communicated to Tehran through Iran’s embassy in Ecuador, which also covers Peru.

Iranian authorities did not immediately respond to Peru’s decision.

Branch 23 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court convicted Zarei of “corruption on Earth,” based on alleged acts including extensive political activity, producing false news, propaganda against the establishment, disrupting security and unauthorized entry into and exit from the country, according to HRANA.

The death sentence was communicated to him on August 23, HRANA said.

Zarei, around 27 and from Tehran, was arrested by Intelligence Ministry agents on April 28 after returning to Iran. His case was initially handled by Branch 3 of Tehran Prosecutor’s Office District 33, known as the Security Prosecutor’s Office, before he was transferred to Qezel Hesar Prison in Karaj on June 30.

He is currently being held in Unit 3, Ward 37 of the prison, according to HRANA.

Zarei lost sight in his right eye after being shot during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests. He was later detained in December 2023 while visiting the graves of protesters killed in the crackdown at Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery and spent 33 days in solitary confinement in Evin Prison.

He subsequently left Iran and reached Germany on a humanitarian visa.

While in Germany, Zarei appeared on stage at a February 14 rally in Munich held on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference alongside exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi who had called for the gathering.

Iranian authorities have increasingly used the death penalty against protesters and political dissidents. Amnesty International has accused authorities of continuing to “weaponize the death penalty to repress dissent,” saying politically motivated death sentences have followed grossly unfair trials.

Last month, Norway-based Iran Human Rights said 29 people arrested in connection with the January 2026 protests had been executed since March 19, in addition to two protesters from the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement. The group said hundreds of protesters were facing the death penalty and warned of an escalation in executions of political prisoners.

The US-based Center for Human Rights in Iran has also said authorities are increasingly using fast-tracked group prosecutions to sentence protesters to death, describing the practice as part of a strategy to punish those who joined protests and deter future dissent.

A confidential quarterly International Atomic Energy Agency report said the agency had made no progress over the past three months in verifying key parts of Iran’s nuclear program, with its continued lack of access to nuclear material remaining a proliferation concern, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing a copy of the report it had seen.

Iran has provided neither information on the status of affected declared nuclear facilities and material nor access needed for on-site verification at the Isfahan Fuel Enrichment Plant.

Iran notified the IAEA on June 12, 2025 that it intended to establish the plant at the Nuclear Reactors Fuel Company site in Isfahan, making it the country’s fourth declared uranium-enrichment facility after two plants at Natanz and one at Fordow.

The IAEA planned to carry out its first design verification at the new facility the following day, but the visit was cancelled when Israeli strikes on Iran began.

The agency has never inspected the plant and says it does not know its precise location, whether it became operational or whether it contained nuclear material. Iran later told the IAEA that the facility had been subjected to military attack, which the agency has been unable to verify.

The uncertainty forms part of a wider gap in the IAEA’s knowledge of Iran’s nuclear material since the June 2025 attacks. Its last estimate before losing verification put Iran’s uranium stockpile at 2,391.1 kg enriched up to 2%, 6,024.4 kg up to 5%, 184.1 kg up to 20% and 440.9 kg enriched up to 60%, close to weapons grade. The agency has since been unable to verify the current quantities or whereabouts of the material.

IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said earlier this year that the agency believed a little more than 200 kg of Iran’s 60%-enriched uranium had been stored in the wider Isfahan tunnel complex and was likely still there. That storage area is distinct from the fourth enrichment facility whose status the agency has been unable to establish.

Underground uranium storage site

Separately, the US-based Institute for Science and International Security last week identified what it assessed to be a probable uranium hexafluoride storage facility at the Natanz Nuclear Complex. The partially underground, bunkered structure was built between 2010 and 2017 and was likely intended to support large-scale enrichment at Natanz, the institute said.

The institute said the facility does not appear to have been targeted in the 2025 or 2026 military strikes, but said its role before and after the June 2025 war remains unclear. It said no vehicle activity had been observed there in available satellite imagery since that conflict.

Iranian nuclear chief Mohammad Eslami said last week that Tehran still considers itself to be in wartime conditions and would not permit inspections of nuclear sites hit by military strikes until a new inspection protocol is established. He said IAEA inspections could continue at facilities that were not attacked.

Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, has meanwhile suggested Tehran could reconsider its longstanding rejection of nuclear weapons, arguing that US attacks had strengthened the case for an atomic bomb as a deterrent.

Rezaei stopped short of saying Iran had decided to develop a nuclear weapon. Tehran continues to maintain that its nuclear program is exclusively peaceful.

Two recent scenes show what that means in practice.

At state-organized rallies in February, marking the anniversary of the 1979 revolution, organizers set fire to effigies they identified as Baal, the Canaanite deity condemned as a false god in both the Bible and the Quran. In the middle of an economic crisis, the state staged its victory over its enemies as a piece of street ritual.

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  Why were ‘Baal’ statues burned at Iran’s revolution anniversary rallies?

Months later, Salar Velayatmadar, a member of parliament, said the decision to stop publishing images of Mojtaba Khamenei had been taken on the advice of senior clerics in Qom, Mashhad and Najaf, and of security officials, so that Iran's enemies could not use "occult sciences," a term covering practices such as talismans, incantations and divination, to harm him.

With that, the occult had entered the official language of national security.

A distinction matters here. This is not an argument about what Iranians privately believe, and the point is not that millions of people hold beliefs about the sacred, as they do in every society. The question begins at the moment an unfalsifiable claim becomes the basis of political legitimacy, a security decision and the distribution of public money. At that point it has stopped being faith and become statecraft.

Nor is this a case of a secular state later contaminated by such thinking. The Islamic Republic's identity was bound from the beginning to a phrase that describes the country as belonging to someone who cannot be seen.

The absent owner

Speaking to government officials in September 1981, Ruhollah Khomeini, the cleric who led the 1979 revolution and founded the Islamic Republic, said: "The owner of this country is the Imam of Time." The line is recorded in volume 15 of Sahifeh-ye Imam, the official collection of his speeches and writings.

The Imam of Time is the twelfth imam of Shia Islam, who is believed to have vanished in the ninth century, to be alive and hidden, and to be destined to return. Iran's constitution frames clerical rule explicitly as an arrangement for the era of his absence.

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  Will Mojtaba Khamenei's absence help the Islamic Republic survive?

Read as a theory of ownership, the consequences are considerable. If the country's true owner is absent, clerics become the interpreters of his will, and the Supreme Leader, rather than representing citizens, becomes the deputy of an absent proprietor. His accountability runs towards a realm no one can reach, not towards a public that could remove him.

Khomeini's arrival did not create popular belief in miracles and unseen forces, which long predated him. What the state he founded did was move those beliefs out of private life and into the machinery of power.

Manufacturing the sacred

The apparatus has been building sanctity around its leaders since the beginning.

The historian Olmo Gölz, in a study of the claim that Khomeini's face could be seen in the moon, drew on memoirs and newspapers of the period to trace both the spread of the rumor and its rejection by Khomeini himself and by a number of clerics. The denial did nothing to prevent the halo forming.

Video from Khomeini's first days back in Tehran shows a man touching his hand and then the hands of the crowd, passing on a blessing said to reside in the leader's body.

Decades later, Mohammad Saeedi, the Friday prayer leader of Qom, said that Ali Khamenei, the late supreme leader, had uttered the name of Imam Ali at the moment of his birth. The political significance of such a story lies not in efforts to establish whether it happened, but in the fact that the official apparatus uses it to build sanctity around a ruler.

The unseen world also has physical addresses. The most important is the mosque at Jamkaran, outside Qom, built on the belief that the hidden imam once appeared on the spot. Its own website describes the well where visitors drop written petitions addressed to him. Around such beliefs the state has built rituals, buildings, media, pilgrimage routes and an economy.

Set in that history, the absence of Mojtaba Khamenei is the most recent expression of the same logic. A leader with no verified image or voice governs a system whose true owner is also described as absent. What looks from outside like a crisis of decision-making, and has clearly produced disagreement inside the government, is material that this apparatus is equipped to convert into mystery, sanctity and waiting.

The security dimension is real, and the comparison with Osama bin Laden's final years captures it. But the difference is in the structure of meaning: the al-Qaeda leader hid in order not to be found, while the ruler of a country said to belong to a hidden imam can turn his own invisibility into symbolic capital.

In a secular system, a vanished leader is a legitimacy crisis. Here, absence was given meaning in advance by the architecture of belief.

Messages attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei extend the same logic outward, describing Iranians as the bearers of a historic mission and placing the public, state institutions and allied forces abroad in a chain of divine purpose. The ruler cannot be seen, but society is required to carry out his mission.

Who pays for it

None of this could have expanded so far without earthly backing.

The Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil, in The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela, described how oil states use wealth from beneath the ground to stage a power that appears miraculous. In the Islamic Republic the metaphor has acquired a literal meaning.

In the state's first decades, oil revenue freed the government from depending on taxation, and therefore from bargaining with its citizens. Money came out of the ground and was spent building an apparatus that took its legitimacy from the sky. Oil remains the state's source of foreign currency: according to data from the analytics firm Kpler, China took about 1.2 million barrels a day from Iran in 2026.

On that foundation, the seminaries, the propaganda organizations, the shrines, religious foundations, devotional associations and cultural institutes became a network for reproducing this worldview.

Superstition in the Islamic Republic moved well beyond the pulpit and the amulet-writer: it acquired organizations, media, staff and budget lines.

In the 2026 budget bill, the Supreme Council of Seminaries was allocated 74.5 trillion rials, about $37 million at market exchange rates, and the Seminary Services Centre 164.2 trillion rials, roughly $82 million. What those figures show is less their size than their presence: bodies of this kind now appear as line items in the national accounts. In the same budget, a meaningful pay rise for civil servants and pensioners was set aside in the name of controlling inflation, while the apparatus that produces and distributes religious legitimacy was left untouched.

The political function of these institutions is clear enough. They produce clerics, preachers, rituals, obedience, enemies and legitimacy. They build a world in which a foreign policy failure becomes a divine test, poverty becomes an occasion for patience, repression becomes the defense of faith, and the survival of the government becomes a sacred promise.

But the apparatus is no longer run on oil money alone. The 2026 bill projects that 87 percent of total budget resources will come from taxation. Oil was central to constructing this ideological edifice; taxes, inflation and the falling purchasing power of Iranians now pay to maintain it.

Magic did not produce oil for the Islamic Republic. The Islamic Republic used oil money to turn magic into an instrument of power.

In the republic of magic, the orders still come from heaven. The bill is increasingly paid out of people's pockets.

The dispute has evolved into a wider argument over what constitutes national security: maintaining strategic capabilities regardless of their costs or reassessing them in light of the risks to Iran’s population, infrastructure and economy.

The controversy began with remarks by Jafar Ghaempanah, executive deputy to President Pezeshkian, who argued that Iran should consider the costs of pursuing its nuclear program amid the threat of further attacks on the country.

“Wisdom means achieving an objective that you can achieve at the lowest possible cost,” he said.

His comments drew fierce criticism from conservatives and hardliners, but the dispute intensified after Yusef Pezeshkian entered the debate in an Instagram story on Saturday.

“Enrichment is neither a principle of religion nor our honour, nor is our survival dependent on it,” he wrote.

Pezeshkian stressed in another story on Sunday that decisions should be made with full awareness of their consequences.

“We must do whatever is necessary to secure our interests,” he wrote, arguing that Iran should pursue enrichment, missiles and drones only insofar as they served those interests.

But he did not retreat from his central argument: “Our survival does not depend on enrichment. We won’t die if we don’t enrich uranium.”

The intervention broadened the controversy, with hardliners directing their criticism not only at Ghaempanah but also at the president and his administration. Some even called for the president to be removed from office.

Hardline attacks

Yadollah Javani, deputy political chief of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), rejected the argument that abandoning enrichment would have prevented war or pressure on Iran in an interview with state television on Sunday.

He said claims that Iran’s nuclear program, human rights record, missile program and regional allies were the fundamental causes of pressure were inconsistent with historical realities. Rather, he argued, these issues were pretexts for a broader confrontation.

The hardline Kayhan newspaper described the positions of Ghaempanah and Yusef Pezeshkian as “subversive”, saying Ghaempanah’s remarks “smell of outright surrender”.

It accused them of being part of a “capitulationist current” and warned that the same logic could eventually be used to justify abandoning Iran’s drone industry, defensive capabilities and regional influence.

The conservative Khorasan newspaper argued that Iran’s enrichment program could not be assessed solely through an economic cost-benefit calculation.

Referring to what it called Iran’s policy of “nuclear ambiguity”, the newspaper argued that continuing enrichment would not give Iran nuclear deterrence but could preserve the possibility of changing its nuclear doctrine in response to a nuclear attack.

It also said enrichment could leave open the possibility of developing so-called dirty bombs and a painful second-strike capability, potentially forcing Iran’s adversaries to reconsider their calculations.

Other conservative critics argued that Washington’s demands would not end with enrichment and that concessions would merely shift pressure to Iran’s missile program and other strategic capabilities.

Meisam Zohourian, a hardline lawmaker, said the more important issue was not simply that Ghaempanah had made the remarks but that the presidential administration’s public relations office had republished them.

“This means that at least a current within the government has decided to openly stand against the Leader’s position,” he wrote.

Reformist defence

Reformist voices have argued that critics of Ghaempanah and Yusef Pezeshkian were putting ideological commitments ahead of the costs imposed on ordinary Iranians.

Rouydad24 said the attacks reflected hostility toward an approach that seeks to define national security through realism and the interests of the population rather than through slogans that impose additional costs.

The website argued that the nuclear dispute could not be reduced to a legal or technological question when its potential costs included the destruction of infrastructure, economic paralysis and threats to the foundations of the state. Iran’s foreign policy, it said, needed to put “prudence” ahead of provocation.

Journalist Davoud Heshmati rejected the argument that giving up enrichment would simply lead Washington to make further demands, describing it as evidence of faulty reasoning.

He argued that the controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program was ultimately connected to Israel’s security concerns and warned against pursuing a nuclear capability that Iran could not adequately protect.

“A bomb that you cannot protect is, in fact, a basis for killing your own people,” he wrote.

The argument now goes beyond whether uranium enrichment itself is worth its cost. The deeper divide is over the lessons Iran should draw from the war: whether vulnerability makes preserving strategic capabilities more necessary, or whether the risks associated with those capabilities require Tehran to reconsider what national security is meant to protect.