Iran escalates Starlink threats over fears of losing internet control

The prison in Karaj in western Tehran was one of the sites of the 1988 massacre of political prisoners. The exact nationwide toll remains unknown amid official secrecy, but rights groups estimate that around 5,000 people were executed across Iran.

Gohardasht was central to the prosecution of Hamid Nouri, a former Iranian prison official sentenced to life imprisonment by a Swedish court in 2022 for war crimes and murder over his role in the executions there. His conviction was upheld on appeal, but Sweden released him in June 2024 in a prisoner exchange with Iran.

Authorities have presented the prison’s redevelopment as a project to provide cultural facilities, university space and parks following its closure in 2023.

Warnings over destruction of evidence

When the prison closed in August 2023, the Norway-based Iran Human Rights organization called for urgent action to prevent its demolition, warning that evidence of atrocities could be lost before the full scope of the crimes was established.

“Gohardasht Prison is the place where crimes against humanity were committed by those who currently hold key positions in the Islamic Republic,” its director, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, said at the time.

“We still don’t know the full scope of those crimes and destroying the evidence is without doubt one of the key motivations behind its closure.”

The organization described the closure as part of a systematic effort to erase traces of state crimes. Its warning came after Nouri’s conviction, while his appeal was still pending.

Executions at Rajaei Shahr continued long after the 1980s. Iran Human Rights said at least 530 people were executed there on murder charges alone between 2015 and 2022.

The group also cited reported efforts to destroy or alter Khavaran cemetery in southeastern Tehran, where victims of the 1988 massacre were buried in unmarked mass graves. Victims’ families had appealed to the UN human rights chief to prevent destruction or interference at the cemetery, it said.

Authorities promise parks and cultural facilities

A Saturday report by Iran’s state-linked Student News Network described the falling watchtower as the end of a familiar urban landmark. It did not address the prison’s role in the 1988 massacre or the warnings about preserving evidence.

Officials have justified the closure by citing a law requiring prisons to move outside cities, alongside complaints about prison-related traffic and other neighborhood problems.

Judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei ordered the closure in April 2023. The prison was emptied by August that year, with prisoners transferred to Ghezel Hesar, according to the state media account.

Demolition of the perimeter walls began in the final month of the Iranian year ending in March 2026 and intensified in September, the report said. The head of Iran’s prisons organization described their removal as necessary to settle the land’s future and enable new projects.

Authorities say the roughly 60-hectare site will include green space, a women’s park, a cultural center, an auditorium and an art gallery. They have also pledged to retain the main prison building for university and cultural uses.

The images drew widespread reactions after they were posted on X on Friday by Ali Gholhaki, a conservative commentator with ties to Iran's security establishment. Some Iranian outlets describe him as close to parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf.

The pictures show smartwatches on the wrists of three men: Gholamreza Jalali, who heads the Passive Defense Organization, the body that protects Iran's critical infrastructure; Reza Farahi, a Defense Ministry official; and Ali Shamkhani, the former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.

Shamkhani was killed in US-Israeli airstrikes on February 28, on the first day of the current war. He had survived an Israeli strike in June 2025.

Asked about his watch by a Fars News reporter, Jalali asked whether people had smart televisions at home and said his device was effectively the same thing.

Gholhaki rejected the comparison. The man in charge of protecting the country's critical infrastructure, he argued, faces a different order of risk from an ordinary citizen, and such devices are hard to justify for senior security officials when Israel has repeatedly exploited electronic lapses to track Iranian personnel.

Smartwatches can transmit location and activity data through GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or a paired phone, and some carry microphones and other sensors.

The US military has long restricted location-tracking devices, smartwatches included, in operational areas because they can expose movements and routines; in 2018, a fitness app's public heat map revealed the outlines of American bases from soldiers' running routes.

'Careless use'

The row touches a much larger argument inside the Islamic Republic about repeated intelligence failures.

During the 12-day war in June 2025, Iran's Cyber Security Command banned officials and their security teams from using any device connected to public communication or telecommunications networks, Fars reported, as concern grew that mobile tracking was being used for targeted assassinations.

The directive named smartphones, laptops and smartwatches, and warned that switching a device off might not prevent it from being located.

It came too late. The New York Times later reported, citing Iranian and Israeli officials, that Israel tracked and targeted senior Iranian leaders and nuclear scientists in that war by hacking the phones of their bodyguards and drivers.

On June 16, 2025, the Supreme National Security Council met in a bunker deep beneath a mountain in western Tehran; none of the officials carried phones, but the Israelis found the meeting through the phones of the bodyguards who had driven them there. The bodyguards had long been exempt from the strict phone bans imposed on the commanders themselves, even after earlier assassinations.

Gholhaki tied the smartwatches directly to those failures, arguing that complacency had helped Israel and the United States kill senior military, security and political figures in successive wars. He called for fundamental changes in security practice and renewed his demand for a broad postwar inquiry into how the failures happened.

Gholhaki himself was among a group of Telegram channel operators arrested by the Revolutionary Guards' counterintelligence arm in 2022, accused of disturbing public opinion and publishing classified documents.

A blogger on death row

The judiciary has shown no such tolerance for ordinary Iranians accused of far smaller breaches.

Marziyeh "Sevda" Ebrahimi Shamsabadi, a 33-year-old blogger from Bandar Abbas who has been held since March, was sentenced to death in August by a Revolutionary Court on charges including insulting the supreme leader, intelligence activity on behalf of hostile governments, and taking and sending photographs to Persian-language media abroad.

One allegation concerned a photograph she was said to have taken, from a distance, of a site hit by a missile. She was held in solitary confinement for 20 days and faced severe pressure during interrogation.

"I just don't see a pathway to rehabilitation," said Kamran Bokhari, a strategic forecaster and senior resident fellow at the Middle East Policy Council.

“This regime cannot go back to what it was.”

The pressure is coming from every direction. The rial fell past 2.5 million to the dollar this week, a record low; at that rate the minimum monthly wage of 166 million rials is worth about $66.

On Wednesday, Washington extended sanctions to Iran's auto and rail industries, on top of a naval blockade of Iranian ports and a campaign against sanctions evasion that have already cut deep into oil revenue and access to foreign currency.

At home, two people detained after January's nationwide protests were executed this week, and four others arrested during the unrest have recently been sentenced to death.

An appeals court upheld sentences of 74 lashes against the singer Parastoo Ahmadi and seven musicians and organizers over a concert she performed without a headscarf, filmed and posted online.

Human Rights Watch and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center documented 29 executions between March and the end of August of people arrested in connection with the protests. Five were carried out in public.

'They want to show they're in charge'

Alberto Fernandez, a former US diplomat and vice president of the Middle East Media Research Institute, said the repression should be read alongside the economic pressure.

"They want to show they're in charge," he said. Extreme violence, he said, is one way of demonstrating to Iranians and to the world that the state can still impose its will. The more it relies on that, the more it shows both the power it has left and the pressure it is trying to hold down.

"The challenge of the regime is not the war," Bokhari said. "The challenge is governance and economic statecraft."

Three senior Iranian sources told Reuters last month that the US campaign against oil exports and sanctions evasion was becoming increasingly hard to withstand. The average monthly wage now covers less than a third of a household's basic costs, Reuters reported.

Even if Tehran wins some sanctions relief, Bokhari said, he sees little prospect of it recovering what it had.

"Regimes take a long time to undergo a meltdown," he said. "That meltdown was happening even before this war."

The price of eggs

David Patrikarakos, a special correspondent for the Daily Mail and an author, said he watches one basic indicator.

"I have become a keen watcher of the price of Iranian eggs," he said.

When he spoke with people inside Iran during the war, he said, the conversation kept returning to the cost of necessities.

"When the basics become too expensive, no government can deal with that," he said. "You can only terrorize people back into their homes for so many things. If they're starving, they can't afford food, there's nothing you can do."

The authorities appear to know it. More than 6,000 people have been arrested since the war began, Reuters reported this week, as officials worry about renewed protests.

But repression has limits. Bokhari called it a "precision instrument" that can backfire when used too broadly.

"You can oppress people, but if you start to do it at scale, then it can backfire," he said. "At some point, your own security forces will say, 'Where is this going?'"

'The butter part is going out'

If the Islamic Republic survives, Fernandez said, one model is what he called the "North Koreanization" or "Houthization" of Iran: a poorer, more predatory state that can still repress at home and project force abroad while its economy and institutions are hollowed out.

That was never the plan. The Islamic Republic wanted revolutionary and military power abroad and a functioning society and middle class at home, Fernandez said, the old combination of guns and butter.

"Well, the butter part is going out," he said.

Without a reversal, he said, Iran could become "a more ramshackle predatory state." "It still can bite, but it becomes much more fragile, much more fractious."

That trajectory would run against Iran's own sense of itself and the aspirations of its educated population, Patrikarakos said. "The Iranian self-image is wanting to take part in the world."

Even the Islamic Republic, for all its decades of confrontation with the West, never sought North Korea's isolation, he said.

"They don't want to go down the North Korea path," Bokhari said. "The question is, can they avoid it?"

As the options narrow, he said, survival is overriding everything else. "Regime survival is now more than ever before the primary imperative."

What to watch

Bokhari said he is watching for infighting that can no longer be contained. "I'm also watching for signs of infighting, where different elements of the regime start to disagree to a point where the disagreement isn't behind closed doors," he said.

Fernandez said the visible divisions are no longer mainly between moderates and conservatives, the old frame for Iranian politics, but among hardline factions themselves.

He is also watching the currency, and how long Tehran can hold out without real relief. Iran's leaders may be looking to the US midterm elections and the next Congress in the hope that politics in Washington will ease the pressure, he said. If that hope fails, they face a long period of no war and no peace while the squeeze continues.

The Islamic Republic has survived periods when it looked weaker, more isolated and less popular than before. Survival and recovery are not the same thing. The price of food, the value of the rial, unrest in the streets, fractures at the top and the loyalty of the security forces will show how far the meltdown has gone.

"This situation is untenable," Bokhari said.

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The organization documented the unlawful killing of 95 Kurdish protesters and bystanders, including 13 children, across 17 counties in Kurdistan, Kermanshah and West Azerbaijan provinces.

Its findings describe repeated patterns of lethal force used to disperse demonstrations, punish protesters and deter further gatherings.

Among those killed was Yahya Rahimi, a 30-year-old man shot in his car in Sanandaj on October 8, 2022, apparently in retaliation for sounding his horn in solidarity with protesters while stuck in traffic.

Sources interviewed by Amnesty said plain-clothes agents smashed Rahimi’s car windows. Shortly after, an agent aimed a shotgun at his head and fired metal pellets from about half a metre away.

Amnesty verified five videos supporting accounts of the killing and reviewed his burial certificate, which recorded extensive brain damage and shattered skull bones caused by a fast-moving projectile.

Wounded protesters left without help

The investigation also documented cases in which security forces obstructed assistance after shooting people.

Shahou Bahmani, 36, was fatally shot in Sanandaj on November 17, 2022, during protests following a memorial gathering for people killed earlier in the uprising.

According to eyewitnesses cited by Amnesty, Bahmani remained bleeding for 30 to 40 minutes while security forces fired at protesters trying to help him. People took him to hospital after the forces withdrew. He was declared dead shortly after arrival.

“The agents would shoot anyone in their sight,” one witness, identified as Iman, told Amnesty.

The organization reviewed two videos showing Bahmani wounded and bleeding as people attempted to assist him, as well as his death certificate.

In Kermanshah, Minoo Majidi was killed on September 20 while fleeing police Special Cohorts on motorcycles. Amnesty said the agents chased protesters and bystanders while repeatedly firing shotguns loaded with metal pellets, hitting Majidi at close range.

Bystanders were also killed. Fereydoon Faraji was shot in Baneh on October 27 while looking out of a window at his workplace as security forces fired at people fleeing the crackdown.

A more militarized response

Amnesty recorded 35 unlawful killings in Kurdistan province, 19 in Kermanshah and 41 in West Azerbaijan.

It found that forces in the three provinces adopted a more militarized response than elsewhere, frequently deploying military-grade firearms soon after protests began.

Weapons included assault rifles, designated marksman rifles, sub-machine guns and heavy machine guns mounted on pickup trucks.

The organization said the lethal force in the documented killings was used to disperse, intimidate or punish people, rather than defend against an imminent threat of death or serious injury.

Kurdish and Baluchi victims together accounted for about 62% of the 326 people Amnesty recorded as killed during protest dispersals or in areas with a militarized security presence.

That figure includes 106 Baluchi protesters and bystanders killed in Sistan and Baluchistan.

Amnesty concluded that the disproportionately high toll could not be explained by protest size alone.

It found that murder and torture against Kurdish and Baluchi protesters were committed with discriminatory intent on political and ethnic grounds, meeting the elements of the crime against humanity of persecution.

The uprising began after the death in custody of Zhina Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman arrested by morality police in Tehran in September 2022.

Amnesty said it sought comments from Iran’s leadership and senior officials before publishing its investigation on September 16, 2026. It had received no responses by publication.

Education Ministry spokesman Ali Farhadi said Friday that reports of teacher resignations were “not true” and accused unspecified actors of trying to undermine in-person education.

“The resignation of teachers is a rumor,” Farhadi told the Tasnim news agency, saying teachers and students had welcomed the return to classrooms across the country, including in southern provinces such as Hormozgan.

But the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations has offered a sharply different account, saying numerous videos and reports of resignations have emerged from different parts of the country in recent weeks.

The council said teachers were leaving because of a combination of wages below the poverty line, worsening living conditions, administrative pressures and what it described as the securitization of the profession, including dismissals, suspensions, arrests and legal cases against teachers and union activists.

It warned that experienced teachers were being driven out of classrooms by policies that had pushed the education system toward decline.

Videos circulating on social media in recent days have shown teachers announcing their resignations and citing financial hardship, workload and a lack of recognition for their work.

The dispute comes as Iran’s education system is already grappling with teacher shortages and longstanding discontent over pay and working conditions.

Teachers have repeatedly protested over salaries and benefits, including at a demonstration outside the Planning and Budget Organization in Tehran in September.

Labor activists have also warned that financial pressures are forcing some teachers to work multiple jobs, while shortages of teaching staff are affecting the quality of education.

The resignations have emerged against a wider backdrop of pressure on teachers and union activists, who in recent years have faced arrests, prison sentences, dismissal and suspension from work.

The Coordinating Council rejected the government’s portrayal of the unrest in schools as the product of outside agitation, arguing that the discontent stems instead from conditions within the education system itself.

Whether the resignations amount to the “wave” described by the teachers’ council is difficult to establish. The pressures it says are driving teachers out are considerably easier to document.