EU leaders on Friday condemned Iran’s attacks against countries in the Middle East and called on Tehran and its proxies to refrain from further attacks and destabilizing activities, according to conclusions adopted at a summit in Brussels.
The European Council confirmed that leaders adopted the conclusions at their October 15-16 meeting.
“The European Council reiterates its strong condemnation of Iran’s attacks against countries in the region and its solidarity with countries affected,” the conclusions said.
“It calls on Iran and its proxies to refrain from such attacks and any destabilising activities, and to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of countries in the region.”
EU leaders also condemned acts threatening navigation or preventing commercial vessels from entering and exiting the Strait of Hormuz, saying any arrangement concerning the waterway must comply with international law and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and must not restrict freedom of navigation or alter its governance.
The European Council reiterated that Iran must never be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon and urged Tehran to comply with its legally binding nuclear safeguards obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and resume full cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The Council also condemned what it described as ongoing violence, repression and large-scale executions in Iran and called for respect for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Iranians, including “the right to choose their own future.”
Separately, EU leaders condemned continued Houthi military escalation in Yemen and strikes against Saudi Arabia, particularly those affecting civilians and civilian infrastructure. They called on the Houthis to immediately cease all military action and attacks against civilian shipping in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab Strait.
A bullet is fired once. For the families of those killed in Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, the punishment that followed lasted for years: bodies held hostage, false confessions forced on parents, funerals fired upon and killers set free, Amnesty International has found.
Threats, lies, humiliation and prison were the state’s weapons. Families were forced into silence under threat of having graves dug up, of rape and of execution. Many were denied even the right to mourn.
In a detailed report published four years after the uprising, Amnesty documented the killing of at least 377 people by security forces between September 2022 and early 2023, more than half of them in the first two weeks of protests, and said the true toll is far higher. The report also documents what happened next to the families of the dead.
Immediately after each unlawful killing, Amnesty found, the authorities began a campaign of silencing and cruelty against the victim’s family. The body was the first hostage, returned only once the family accepted the state’s false account of the death.
A wide range of institutions took part: the Intelligence Ministry, the police’s crowd-control units, the Revolutionary Guards’ Intelligence Organization, local Basij units, judicial and provincial officials, governors and local Friday prayer leaders.
‘Rioters,’ accidents and drugs
The pattern of forced narratives was almost identical across the country. A death had to be blamed on “rioters,” “counter-revolutionary groups,” “terrorists” or the opposition Mojahedin-e Khalq, or else on suicide, illness, an accident or drug use.
In Divandarreh, in Kordestan province in western Iran, hours after Fuad Ghadimi was killed on September 19, 2022, officials took his father to the state broadcaster and forced him to make false statements on air, threatening to withhold his son’s body and endanger his other children.
Plainclothes agents watched the grave and repeatedly replaced the headstone to remove the word shahid, martyr, which the family had carved on it.
In Kermanshah, Ardalan Ghasemi was shot on November 10 while writing slogans on a wall. An official at the hospital told his family that if they filed a complaint, his body would stay in the morgue for months, and to make the point, showed them the decomposed body of another person.
The family got Ardalan back only after signing a false statement that he had been killed while stealing a car.
The case of Fereshteh Ahmadi in Mahabad, in West Azarbaijan province, is among the most chilling in the report. Half an hour after she died on October 27, four agents dressed as nurses tried to take her body secretly out of the hospital. When the family stopped them, one agent held a gun to her husband’s head and threatened to kill him.
Her brother, Ebrahim Ahmadi, was arrested and held for 28 days in solitary confinement by the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence arm in Sardasht. Agents offered him double the usual blood money if he would blame Kurdish opposition groups for her death. He refused.
The denial was even more intense when the victims were women and girls, Amnesty found. The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran also concluded that, compared with men, the deaths of women protesters were routinely blamed on alcohol, suicide, ordinary crime, illness, road accidents, family disputes or falls from windows and buildings. The authorities played down women’s deaths to stop them becoming symbols.
Funerals under fire
Burials became another front for intimidation. Security forces tried to move bodies to undisclosed locations. In Javanrud, in Kermanshah province, the Revolutionary Guards took the body of Ismail Golanbar to their regional Najaf Ashraf base and returned it only on condition that he be buried outside the town.
Kumar Daraftadeh, a 16-year-old boy killed in Piranshahr on October 30, was given an hour for washing and burial; after repeated pleas, his family was allowed to bury him the next day, in a village 25 kilometers away.
Violence against mourners at times exceeded the violence against protesters. At the funeral of Zanyar Abubakri in Mahabad on October 27, hundreds of mourners carried his body above their heads while police special forces fired on them with assault rifles, birdshot and tear gas.
In Bukan, the brother of Shahriar Mohammadi, killed on November 18, described throwing himself onto his brother’s body to stop agents from seizing it. They beat him repeatedly on the head, kicked the body and shot him in the leg with birdshot at close range.
Hospitals, morgues and death certificates
Another layer of repression ran through hospitals, morgues and the coroner’s office. By forcing hasty burials, often within hours, the authorities sidestepped the legal requirement for an autopsy. When autopsies were carried out, families were usually denied the results.
In Sanandaj, the capital of Kordestan province, the coroner told the family of Hooman Abdollahi, shot directly in the heart on December 7, the cause of death only verbally. The family never received a written report or even a burial certificate.
Police seized the ambulance carrying his body and took it to an unknown location, and the family was made to bury him at night with no one else present.
Minoo Majidi, killed in Kermanshah on September 20, had 167 pellets in her body. A forensic expert told her family so, but no written report was ever issued.
Even the language of death certificates was changed to hide the truth. Phrases such as “impact of hard objects” or “hunting pellets” appeared without any indication of their source.
For Habibollah Fathi, killed by a live round to the head on November 19, a first certificate gave the cause of death as “unknown.” When the family asked for it to be corrected, a second certificate cited heart disease.
The authorities also kept families from seeing their dead. In Sanandaj, relatives of Peyman Monbari, killed on October 8, were made to sign a document stating they had viewed the body, while what they received at the cemetery was a body already washed and shrouded.
Justice denied
Some families, despite everything, tried to seek justice through the courts. Amnesty was able to gather and examine ten such cases from eight provinces.
In four, prosecutors cleared the killers with a single line citing insufficient evidence. Two were referred to military courts to set blood money, without any investigation.
In two more, the authorities themselves admitted that security agents had fired the shots, but sent the cases not to a criminal court but to a military court to determine compensation, and only on condition that the victim be proven innocent.
One case did end in a sentence of qisas, retribution in kind. Mohammad Jamehbozorg was shot in the face in Malard, west of Tehran, after agents raided his home, where he had sheltered protesters.
A court sentenced the agent to death and the Supreme Court upheld the ruling. Then, after direct intervention by Revolutionary Guards commanders and Malard’s Friday prayer leader, the charge was reduced from intentional to unintentional killing, and the killer received three years in prison.
The cases of Sepehr Beiranvand in Khorramabad and Mehran Samak in Bandar Anzali followed the same course: an initial conviction, then the ruling overturned and the case sent back for review. Samak was shot after honking his car horn in solidarity with people celebrating Iran’s World Cup defeat to the United States.
The Bloody Friday case in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan and Baluchestan province, where security forces killed at least 87 people, most of them Baluch worshippers, on September 30, 2022, ended with prison sentences for a few low-ranking officers. All the commanders were acquitted.
The forces of repression were ready to kill and to intimidate. Security agents were trained to cover up the killings and to threaten families, and the judiciary stood ready to clear the killers and protect the forces behind them.
These accounts are an undeniable part of the Islamic Republic’s crimes against humanity: crimes that began in the streets and continued, for months and years afterward, in the suppression of families.
Iranian security and judicial authorities have taken action against Baha’is in the central city of Yazd at least 34 times in less than seven months, raiding homes, summoning dozens for interrogation and jailing members of the faith, the rights group HRANA reported on Friday.
Between March 28 and October 15, HRANA recorded 11 searches of homes and other property, 18 summonses for interrogation, three prison sentences and one person taken to prison to serve his term.
The targets went beyond people facing charges to guests at private gatherings and their relatives. Agents seized phones, computers, books, photographs and religious materials, and in one case a car.
On March 28, Intelligence Ministry agents broke up a gathering of about 50 Baha’is sharing a traditional soup, a local Yazd custom, and took their phones without a warrant. The phones have not been returned despite legal complaints. About 12 of those present were later summoned for questioning.
The pressure peaked in September, when six homes were searched and six people summoned. On September 27, about 40 agents searched the home of the family of Farhang Amiri, a Baha’i who was stabbed to death outside his house in Yazd on that date in 2016. The two men charged in his killing said they had attacked him because of his faith. That night agents also searched the homes of his son, daughter and son-in-law, and on October 1 they searched the family’s farm.
Flora Samadani, a Yazd resident, was sentenced by the city’s Revolutionary Court to three years and one day in prison for “deviant propaganda contrary to Islam by promoting Baha’ism.” Her husband, Ahmad Jafari Naeimi, received six months and one day for assisting her. Moein Mohammadi-Dehaj, 39, was sentenced in the summer to 16 years and seven months in prison, a 10-year loss of civil rights and a lifelong ban from public employment.
The crackdown extends well beyond Yazd. Raids on Baha’i homes since the January protests amount to “state-sponsored theft,” the Baha’i International Community’s representative to the UN in Geneva told Iran International in August, citing hundreds of incidents.
“With the misuse of their state authority, they essentially steal Baha’is’ properties with complete impunity,” Simin Fahandej said.
The community said this week that the case of 26 Baha’is in Shiraz, acquitted nearly four years ago, had been reopened, and that as of October 2 at least 64 Baha’is were in detention or prison, with 19 more serving sentences under electronic tags or on furlough. In August, 13 UN experts warned of torture, enforced disappearances and a sharp rise in persecution.
Iran’s Baha’is, estimated at more than 300,000, form the country’s largest non-Muslim minority. The constitution recognizes only Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, and Baha’is have faced systematic persecution since the 1979 revolution, including bans from universities, business closures and property confiscations.
Iran has executed a 28-year-old Iraqi man convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia, a charge he denied, according to the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights.
Iran has executed a 28-year-old Iraqi man convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia, a charge he denied, according to the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights.
Ayoub Mohammad Nabil, from Haditha in western Iraq, was hanged on Sunday morning at Lakan Prison in Rasht, the capital of Gilan province on the Caspian coast, the group said. Iranian officials and domestic media had not reported his sentence or his execution by the time it was announced.
Nabil had entered Iran legally on his passport and was working as a caretaker at a private villa when Intelligence Ministry agents arrested him in the nearby town of Fouman on August 26, 2025. He had no prior security record, Iran Human Rights said.
A source told the group he was held for about five months at the Intelligence Ministry’s detention center in Rasht, where he was subjected to severe psychological torture. He denied any link to Saudi Arabia or groups tied to it, and said he had been accused because he was a practicing Sunni Muslim, wore a beard and taught the Quran to local children in his guardhouse.
Despite no evidence of any political activity, the source said, Branch One of Rasht’s Revolutionary Court sentenced him to death for “moharebeh,” or waging war against God, through spying for Saudi-backed proxy groups.
The Kurdish rights group Hengaw, citing its own sources, said Nabil was moved to solitary confinement for execution on October 8, as fighting between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthis intensified.
He is at least the 17th person executed in Iran on espionage charges this year, and the third Iraqi, according to Iran Human Rights. Thirteen were accused of spying for Israel or the United States; the other two Iraqis were accused of spying for an unnamed Arab country, and an Afghan man for an unnamed state. Fifteen of the 17 were executed after the war began in February.
More than 70 political prisoners have been executed in Iran since the January protests, and at least 20 more face execution on political charges, Iran International has found.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a report on Thursday that capital cases in Iran, especially security cases, involve systematic violations of fair-trial rights, including forced confessions, closed trials lasting minutes and restricted access to independent lawyers. He called for an immediate halt to executions.
The rights group HRANA said last week that at least 2,003 people were executed in Iran in the year to October 8, up 29 percent on the previous year.
Decades of American sanctions strengthened Iran’s Revolutionary Guards by hollowing out the middle class, former US diplomat Joey Hood told Iran International, and once the fighting ends, Tehran will face a reckoning with its own people.
Hood, who retired earlier this year after 27 years in the Foreign Service, served as acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, deputy chief of mission in Iraq and Kuwait, and US ambassador to Tunisia. He spoke in a studio interview.
He called the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 and the 444-day hostage crisis that followed “the very definition of evil,” adding that the protection of envoys is an ancient principle recognized in Islamic tradition as well.
What followed, he said, was a pattern. In 1983, a suicide bombing at the US Marine barracks in Beirut killed 241 American service members who had been deployed as peacekeepers; US courts have found Iran responsible for the attack, carried out by militants who went on to form Hezbollah. In 1996, the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia was bombed; US investigators blamed Saudi Hezbollah (Hezbollah Al-Hejaz), acting with Iranian support. In 2011, US prosecutors charged an Iranian-American man with plotting, on behalf of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. Argentina’s courts have held Iran responsible for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, and plots have been traced to Iran in Europe and Asia.
None of it, Hood said, has won the Islamic Republic a single endorsement.
“You haven’t seen any other country come out and say, ‘What the Iranian regime is doing is great,’” he said. “There’s no sovereign government anywhere in the world that has made such a declaration.”
‘Handing the economy over’
Successive US administrations from Carter to Obama tried various forms of engagement, Hood said, but repeatedly underestimated Tehran’s refusal to accept normal relations. Even when presidents saw the risks, they often stopped short of decisive action. Jimmy Carter understood the danger before admitting the exiled Shah to the United States for cancer treatment in October 1979, weeks before the embassy was seized. After the Beirut bombing, Ronald Reagan withdrew the Marines and limited the American response largely to sanctions, a choice Hood said emboldened Tehran.
Analysts warned as early as the Obama years, Hood said, that sanctions were “squeezing out the normal middle-class businessmen and women and handing the economy over to a shadowy black-market economy” run by the Revolutionary Guards. That has come true, he said: the Guards grew stronger and the middle class weaker, and that middle class has periodically taken to the streets.
The Islamic Republic drew its own lesson from the fall of the Shah, whose government collapsed after months of protest, Hood said. It keeps using lethal force until protests stop, as it did in 2009, 2019 and January 2026.
Congress favors sanctions because they appear to cost no American lives, Hood said, “but Iranian lives certainly are at stake, especially for the middle class and the poor.”
Money is also fungible. Relief that came with the 2015 nuclear deal, he said, went to regional militias rather than public welfare, with particularly deadly results in Syria. Hood declined to use the name Hezbollah, which means “Party of God” in Arabic, calling the group “Iran’s militia in Lebanon.” “God does not have a political party here on Earth, and certainly not a militia,” he said.
Coalitions, not bilateral deals
A more effective approach, Hood said, would press on the nuclear program and the militia network at the same time, with allies rather than through bilateral arrangements.
Under Obama, near-unanimous support in Congress for sanctions helped bring even Russia and China along on the nuclear file. Without that kind of coalition, he said, constraints stay limited. The bilateral agreements the current administration has made with Saudi Arabia, Syria and others help partners defend themselves, but isolating Tehran needs broader coordination.
He tied the Houthis’ recent escalation against Saudi Arabia to Tehran’s difficulty moving fuel and running its shadow fleet under US pressure, and said the Yemeni group would pose no comparable threat without Iranian support. With less leverage in the Strait of Hormuz, he said, Tehran and its allies have turned to other targets, among them Saudi Arabia and potentially the Bab el-Mandeb strait or the Suez Canal.
October, ahead of the US midterm elections, is a period of heightened risk, he said, given the Islamic Republic’s record of trying to influence American votes.
‘Answered for in Iran’
The decisive change since the 12-day war in June 2025, Hood said, is that “anything that Iran or its militias do around the world will be answered for in Iran.” Earlier presidents avoided direct confrontation and preferred to fight Tehran’s proxies.
“That’s the big difference now,” he said. “Iranians themselves are having to pay for Iran’s foreign policy for the first time.”
When active military operations end, Hood said, he expects a reckoning between the Islamic Republic and its own people. Without a lasting coalition to constrain it, he said, the confrontation that began in 1979 will go on in new phases, with more attacks on American interests and partners.
Iran managed to export jet fuel to Myanmar and send several shipments of liquefied petroleum gas out of the region despite a US naval blockade that has largely halted its crude exports, Reuters reported on Friday.
Satellite imagery and analysis by maritime intelligence group SynMax showed a tanker carrying Iranian jet fuel reached Myanmar in September, Reuters said.
Myanmar’s military government did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment on whether it had received the cargo.
The United States imposed targeted sanctions on Myanmar’s jet-fuel sector in 2023, citing military airstrikes on civilians. Myanmar’s military has denied deliberately targeting civilians.
LPG cargoes also passed through
At least eight gas tankers carrying Iranian LPG left the Gulf of Oman since mid-July, according to analysis by United Against Nuclear Iran, which tracks tanker movements using ship and satellite data.
The cargoes totaled an estimated 4.1 million barrels, UANI senior research analyst Jemima Shelley told Reuters.
Four people involved in maritime security and tracking Persian Gulf oil movements told Reuters that Iran had been concealing some cargoes among a growing number of ship-to-ship transfers by other regional producers off Oman.
Some Iranian LPG tankers transferred cargoes near the Omani coastal towns of Shinas and Sohar, while others waited in the Gulf of Oman before continuing their voyages, Shelley said.
Most then sailed toward Malaysia’s Eastern Outer Port Limits for additional ship-to-ship transfers, with China considered the likely ultimate destination, according to UANI’s analysis.
Most Iranian crude exports remain blocked
The shipments remain a fraction of Iran’s previous energy exports and do not appear to represent a broad breakthrough in the blockade.
Shelley said the LPG movements appeared to reflect “more opportunism” than a new Iranian strategy for moving large volumes of oil and petroleum products on smaller ships.
Iranian crude exports fell to zero in September, according to Kpler, marking the first month without a shipment since the analytics firm began tracking Iranian exports in 2013.
Six of the eight LPG tankers identified by UANI, as well as the vessel carrying jet fuel, were under US sanctions for transporting Iranian petroleum or petrochemical products, Reuters said.
US military says blockade remains in force
US Central Command said the blockade remains “ironclad.”
A US military official told Reuters that a ship passing through the area does not necessarily mean it evaded the blockade. US forces assess vessels individually, including by reviewing their documents, and some can be allowed through for humanitarian reasons, the official said.
The official added that being on a US sanctions list does not automatically make a vessel subject to interdiction and that US forces sometimes monitor ships without taking action for operational reasons.
CENTCOM said this week that four commercial vessels had been disabled and 135 ships turned around during the three months since the latest blockade was imposed.
The blockade was first introduced in April, lifted in June following a draft US-Iran understanding and reimposed on July 14 after that arrangement collapsed.
Washington questions shipping data
A US Treasury spokesperson questioned whether tracking data alone could show that vessels had successfully evaded the blockade, noting that ships can spoof locations or operate under false identities.
The spokesperson said such data should be treated cautiously and said Washington’s sanctions campaign and naval blockade were sharply restricting Iran’s access to export revenue.
The Iranian government did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
Torbjorn Soltvedt of Verisk Maplecroft told Reuters that worsening economic conditions could push Iran to take greater risks in trying to move petroleum products abroad, particularly jet fuel if domestic aviation restrictions leave Iranian refineries with excess supply.
