Iran is facing supply difficulties for around 40 of its roughly 700 vital and essential medicines, Food and Drug Administration spokesman Mohammad Hashemi said Saturday.
Speaking to ILNA news agency, Hashemi said authorities were working to strengthen strategic medicine reserves. He said the country's vaccine stocks were sufficient to meet demand for an extended period.
Hashemi said more than 200 pharmaceutical companies and about 3,000 medical equipment firms operate in Iran, stressing the importance of maintaining their production to safeguard medical supplies.
File photo: Iranian ballistic missile Khorramshahr is said to have a range of approximately 2,000 kilometres
Iran's Revolutionary Guards said Saturday that restrictions on the range of the country's ballistic missiles had been lifted, raising the prospect of strikes against targets farther afield if US or Israeli attacks resume.
Iran has long maintained that it voluntarily restricted the range of its ballistic missiles to 2,000 kilometres (about 1,200 miles), sufficient to reach Israel and US military installations across much of the Middle East.
Referring to a recent directive from Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei to respond to threats with “no geographical limits,” IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi said: “That restriction has been lifted for us.”
He did not say whether Iran had developed or deployed missiles capable of exceeding its previously declared range limit, saying only that the country's capabilities should be demonstrated in practice, not through public statements.
Ali Bilali, an adviser to the commander of the IRGC Aerospace Force, said Saturday that Iran's missiles had a range of about 2,000 kilometres and were capable of precision strikes.
The question of whether Iran possesses longer-range weapons gained prominence during the war in March, when US and British officials said two ballistic missiles had been launched towards Diego Garcia, a joint American-British military base in the Indian Ocean nearly 4,000 kilometres from Iranian territory.
British Defence Secretary John Healey said one fell short and the other was intercepted before reaching its target. Iran denied responsibility for the attempted strike.
Iran's ballistic missile programme has repeatedly featured in US demands for restrictions on Tehran's military capabilities, although it appears to have receded from more recent diplomatic proposals, which have focused primarily on the nuclear programme.
Missiles are central to Iran's military deterrence, especially after two rounds of war that severely degraded its air defences and other conventional capabilities.
Regional powers, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, press for a negotiated settlement between Tehran and Washington, seeking to avert another round of fighting that could threaten their security, disrupt energy supplies and inflict further economic damage across the region.
Speaking at a news conference marking the IRGC's Aerospace Week, Mohebbi said the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had previously directed the military to halt increases in missile range at certain times and authorised extensions at others.
He also claimed that the Guards had moved missile and drone production underground during the wars with Israel and the United States, allowing manufacturing to continue despite bombardment.
“Any point from which we sense a serious threat against our country can become our target,” Mohebbi said, warning that further attacks on Iran would carry a heavy price for its adversaries.
File photo: Solar panels installed on rooftops among traditional wind towers in Yazd, central Iran
Iran's imports of Chinese solar panels fell by more than 80% in 2026, threatening efforts to expand renewable power generation as the country struggles with worsening electricity shortages.
A new report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that Chinese solar panel exports to Iran during the January–September period fell to less than one-fifth of the level recorded in the same period last year.
Data from energy think tank Ember show that China exported just 138 megawatts of solar panels to Iran during those nine months, worth approximately $15 million.
The decline comes as Iran grapples with severe natural gas shortages, air pollution and drought, leaving the government with limited options to expand thermal and hydropower generation, even if sufficient funding were available.
According to assessments by Iran's Energy Ministry and parliament's research centre, the country needs to add more than 5,000 megawatts of electricity generation capacity annually to avoid power shortages.
Failure to meet generation expansion targets in recent years has left Iran facing substantial electricity deficits throughout the year. During peak summer demand, the shortfall can exceed 20% of peak consumption.
The recent war has compounded those pressures. Iranian officials say around 4,000 megawatts of the country's power generation capacity were damaged during the conflict.
In April, a major warehouse storing equipment for Iran's solar power projects was also targeted in an attack. Iran's Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Organization (SATBA) estimated damage to the renewable energy sector at approximately $1.5 billion.
In recent years, the government has increasingly focused on solar power development.
According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Iran's installed solar power capacity surged by 128% in 2025 from the previous year, reaching approximately 1,781 megawatts.
Data from Ember, cited by the IEA, also show that Iran's solar panel imports from China in 2024 and 2025 combined were more than ten times higher than in previous years, suggesting considerable room for further expansion of the country's solar power capacity.
The sharp decline in imports this year could therefore undermine efforts to sustain that expansion, although the figures do not establish how much equipment Iran may already have in stock.
Iran falls behind regional competitors
Despite its recent solar expansion, Iran has fallen significantly behind regional competitors.
In 2025, Turkey and Saudi Arabia each added around five times as much solar capacity as Iran. Their total installed solar power capacities were approximately 12 times and seven times Iran's, respectively.
Another major weakness in Iran's renewable energy sector is the lack of progress in wind power. The country's installed wind capacity has remained unchanged at 378 megawatts for several years.
By comparison, Turkey commissioned around 2,000 megawatts of new wind power capacity last year, bringing its total to nearly 15,000 megawatts.
Globally, 692 gigawatts of new renewable power capacity were installed last year. Renewable capacity growth in the Middle East was approximately 28%, with Saudi Arabia recording the region's strongest expansion.
Saudi Arabia doubled its renewable power capacity in 2025 to more than 12,000 megawatts.
Turkey has roughly twice as much installed solar and wind capacity as Saudi Arabia, while the United Arab Emirates and Israel each have nearly 8,000 megawatts of renewable capacity.
Iran, meanwhile, has shifted from being a net electricity exporter to a net importer.
A decade ago, the country recorded a net electricity export surplus of around eight terawatt-hours. Last year, its electricity trade balance turned negative.
In recent months, Tehran has held talks with Turkmenistan to increase electricity imports and with Turkey to begin importing power from its western neighbour.
China's regional solar exports rebound
The collapse in Iran's solar panel imports contrasts with a rebound in Chinese shipments to several other Middle Eastern markets.
Chinese solar panel exports to a number of Arab countries initially declined by nearly half during the first eight months of 2026, but shipments to the broader region subsequently recovered.
According to a report by the China Chamber of Commerce in the UAE, citing Shanghai Metals Market data, China's photovoltaic module exports reached 23.92 gigawatts in September, up 44.2% from August.
Combined exports to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey more than tripled in September to 3.97 gigawatts, with Saudi Arabia alone purchasing 2.9 gigawatts.
The figures suggest that Iran's sharp decline cannot be explained solely by a broader contraction in Chinese solar panel exports to the region, although the September rebound elsewhere does not establish the reasons for Iran's nine-month downturn.
With electricity shortages worsening and neighbouring countries accelerating renewable energy investment, Iran risks falling further behind at a time when expanding its power generation capacity has become increasingly urgent.
Iranians demonstrate in Frankfurt, Germany, on November 7, 2026.
Iranian exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi accepted Germany’s Freedom Prize for the Iranian people in Frankfurt on Saturday, its first award to a nation rather than a person, and said he would hold it until he could hand it to them in Tehran, as tens of thousands rallied in the city.
Iran’s exiled prince Reza Pahlavi accepted Germany’s Freedom Prize on behalf of the Iranian people in Frankfurt on Saturday, the first time the award has gone to a nation rather than a person, as tens of thousands of Iranians rallied in the city for the uprising at home.
The Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom presented the 2026 prize at St. Paul’s Church, the seat of Germany’s first elected national assembly in 1848. The foundation, which is affiliated with the liberal Free Democratic Party, has awarded the prize every two years since 2006 to individuals who advance civil society and liberal values. This year it chose a nation.
“Not to any group, any party or any person,” said the foundation’s chairman, Steffen Saebisch, “but to a people: the Iranian nation.”
Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah and the best-known figure in the opposition, holds the prize in trust until, in the foundation’s words, representatives freely elected by Iranians can receive it.
Iran’s exiled prince Reza Pahlavi receives the Friedrich Naumann Foundation’s 2026 Freedom Prize, awarded to the Iranian people, at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt on November 7, 2026.
Pahlavi said he had agreed to take the prize only on condition that he hold it as a custodian, not an owner.
“A custodian safeguards something of great value that belongs to someone else,” he said. “When the time comes, he returns it intact and in its entirety.”
That time, he said, was nearer than Tehran would admit. “One day, and I believe that day is closer than the dying clerical regime would like to admit, I will place it in the hands of its rightful owners, the Iranian people. Not on foreign soil, but in our capital, Tehran.”
He described the country as a house whose owners had been shut out. “For 47 years, Iran has been like a house whose residents, its rightful owners, have been locked out of their own home or held captive inside it,” he said. “The keys were taken from the people in 1979. I see it as my duty to help reclaim those keys and return them to their only rightful owners, the Iranian people.”
He paid tribute to the families of those killed in the struggle for freedom.
‘A nation willing to die for the right to vote’
Pahlavi built his speech on the building. In 1848 Germany’s first elected parliament sat in St. Paul’s Church and wrote a catalogue of rights that never took effect. In 1906, he said, merchants and intellectuals in Tehran forced the creation of Iran’s first parliament and “believed exactly what the men in this church in 1848 believed: that the nation is not the property of potentates, but of the people.”
Germany’s road ran through Weimar into Nazism, he said; Iran’s constitution was buried under a theocracy. “But this building teaches a lesson that tyrants never learn. The ideas of 1848 were not defeated.”
The church was bombed to ruins in 1944 and rebuilt by 1948, among the first buildings in the city to rise again. “A people standing in ruins chose to rebuild their house of freedom first. You did not forget liberty,” he said. “Well, neither have we.”
He described himself as a bridge. “A bridge carries people from one shore to another. One does not build a home on a bridge. You cross it, and then it has done its most important job.”
Iranians demonstrate in Frankfurt, Germany, November 7, 2026.
A German lawmaker, he said, had asked him this year whether Iranians were really ready for democracy. “I will admit the question stung.” His answer: “They prove it every time they march unarmed toward men with machine guns. They prove it when they organize strikes in a country with no free unions, and spread the truth in a country with no free press. A people willing to die for the right to vote is ready to exercise the right to vote.”
He asked the families of those killed in January, who were in the hall, to stand, and the audience to rise for them. “Daughters shielded by their dying fathers. Sons killed holding their mothers’ hands. That is the Islamic Republic.”
Pahlavi defended his support for military pressure on Iran’s rulers, a position that has divided the opposition. For years, he said, he had argued against both appeasement and war, for “maximum pressure on the regime, and maximum support for the Iranian people.”
January changed that. “An unarmed people cannot be asked to defeat, with bare hands, a state prepared to kill without limit,” he said. “We needed this humanitarian intervention and we do not apologize for it.” He said the targets should be the Revolutionary Guards and “the apparatus that turns its guns on our people,” and civilians and civilian infrastructure spared. “Every innocent Iranian lost in this war is a grief I carry.”
Pressure from outside could weaken the Islamic Republic, he said, “but it cannot replace it, and it must not try to choose what comes next. That belongs to the Iranian people alone.”
He set out four principles he called four freedoms: Iran’s territorial integrity; equal rights for every citizen “whatever their language, their origin or their beliefs”; a secular state that belongs to Shia and Sunni, Baha’i, Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian and the non-religious “because it belongs to none of them, exclusively”; and the right of Iranians to choose their form of government at the ballot box.
“Please notice what is not on this list,” he said. “No name, no party, no system of government is on it, because all of those choices belong to the people. I will not take it from them. Nor will I allow others to.”
To Iranians who had written that he should not be the one to hold the prize, he said: “Thank you. You were able to make your objections freely, in German newspapers and on German streets, without fear of arrest or a bullet. That is exactly the freedom I am fighting for in Tehran.” And: “My hand is open. To monarchists and republicans. To the left and the right. We do not have to agree about the past to agree about the future.”
Iranians demonstrate in Frankfurt, Germany, November 7, 2026.
He asked Germany for three things. Justice: to prosecute the crimes of January as German courts in Koblenz had tried Syrian torturers, so that “every commander still deciding whether to fire on his own people” knows “the world is keeping a record.” Connection: help Iranians stay online, because “the regime’s most important weapon on January 8 was not a rifle. It was the off switch.” And no deal over Iranians’ heads: “Any arrangement that keeps this regime in power buys a short calm and pays for it with Iranian lives.”
He cited Tehran’s support for Russia in Ukraine, the foiled plot against RAF Fairford, the 1992 Mykonos restaurant killings in Berlin and the execution of the German citizen Jamshid Sharmahd, and asked Germany to protect Iranians living under its watch from the state’s agents.
He ended with the Berlin Wall, which fell 37 years ago this week. “No one in this hall in 1988 would have dared to predict it,” he said. “That is how dictatorships end: slowly, and then all at once. That day is coming to Iran.”
‘No people paid a higher price’
Saebisch paid tribute to Iranians killed, jailed or exiled for opposing the Islamic Republic, and to “the hundreds of thousands who, despite mortal danger, take to the streets,” the women defying the morality police, and those who risk their lives to send videos out of the country. “Freedom often comes late,” he said, “but it comes.”
The foundation’s decision was driven by the January massacre, when security forces killed thousands of protesters and shut down the internet.
“I think no people in the world paid a higher price for freedom in this year,” Ludwig Theodor Heuss, a member of the foundation’s board of trustees, told the Jerusalem Post before the ceremony. “The terrible thing is that these things go on. The killing goes on.”
Frankfurt’s mayor, Nils Kößler, said the prize was “dedicated to the people who protested and were killed in the most brutal manner,” and to “those who are in the regime’s prisons, enduring torture and facing execution at this very moment.” He ended his speech in Persian: “Be omid-e azadi,” in hope of freedom.
Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, who chairs the European Parliament’s security and defense committee, said the world had stopped talking about Iranians.
“The world is negotiating over the nuclear issue and now also over the closure of the Strait of Hormuz,” she said. “But hardly anyone is talking about the people in Iran anymore.”
She called for freezing the assets of the Revolutionary Guards and their officials and for sanctions on security personnel, judges and prison authorities.
“Anyone negotiating with Tehran must never, under any circumstances, leave human rights off the table.”
“The future of Iran will not be decided by us in this church, nor by Washington, Berlin or Brussels,” she said. “Only the Iranian people will decide, freely and democratically.”
The rally
The ceremony opened a day of demonstrations around the world that organizers said were in support of the national uprising in Iran.
The gatherings began in Australia and Japan, before dawn in Europe, and are expected to continue through the day in cities across Europe, the United States and Canada. The largest is in Frankfurt, where the city moved the main rally from the riverside to Ostpark because the original site was too small for the crowd expected.
Police planned for 24,000 marchers from the Römerberg square and 30,000 at the park, where a stage and loudspeaker towers had been built overnight.
Iranian pro-monarchy supporters of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran's last shah and an Iranian opposition figure, demonstrate in Frankfurt, Germany, November 7, 2026.
Yasmine Pahlavi said Frankfurt police had told the couple that threats from the Islamic Republic meant her husband could not appear or speak at the rally. His office said later that he still intended to join the gathering after the ceremony.
The prize came in a week when the Islamic Republic hanged two protesters, Amirhossein Maleki, 20, and Amirhossein Ebrahimi, 19, over the Isfahan protests, and days after it executed a third man in Sistan and Baluchestan. The foundation’s Heuss said more than 70 people were executed in October alone.
Israel’s prime minister and his Mossad chief planned an operation against Iran on the eve of Israel's October 27 election, over the objections of other security chiefs, and dropped it after a mistake by an Israeli operative tipped off Washington, Channel 12 reported on Friday.
The report, which the channel said was unsourced and broadcast under military censorship, did not describe the operation. It said other senior figures in the security establishment opposed it because it could cause an escalation and force the election to be postponed, but that planning went ahead until the United States learned of it and moved to stop it.
The Prime Minister's Office denied the report: "The prime minister himself clarified in real time that an attack before the Israeli elections was not on the agenda."
The account follows a run of reports in the week of the vote. On October 25, two days before the election, Channel 12 reported an "unprecedented confrontation" between Benjamin Netanyahuand the military chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, over an instruction for unspecified action involving Iran, with Zamir demanding further deliberations and signed legal authorization.
Iran International carried that report at the time. The next day Channels 12 and 13 reported that Zamir was the only security chief to oppose the action, and the New York Times reported, citing three senior defense officials, that Netanyahu had "sought for weeks to orchestrate a new airstrike on Iran" and was blocked by Zamir.
CNN reported that Netanyahu had asked President Donald Trump to approve a joint strike before the election and that Trump refused.
Netanyahu called the October 25 report "nonsense," saying in the same interview that he had "instructed the IDF and Mossad to topple the regime" in Iran. Former prime minister Ehud Barak said on Thursday that Netanyahu had planned "a provocation" via the Mossad "behind the back of the IDF chief of staff."
Friday's report came as Qatari-mediated talks between Washington and Tehran continued. Channel 12 reported this week that Netanyahu had urged Trump to resume the war immediately after Tuesday's US midterm elections, and that Trump wanted to give the talks more time.
"We're talking to Iran," Trump told reporters on Friday. "We haven't lost a soldier in six or seven months."
A worker packs dates in Ghasr-e Shirin, western Iran, November 5, 2026
While Tehran celebrates Donald Trump's midterm defeat and the economic pain the Iran war has inflicted on Americans, soaring prices and stagnant wages are pushing ordinary Iranians deeper into a cost-of-living crisis at home.
Senior Iranian officials have come close to claiming credit for the Democrats' sweeping election victory, frequently pointing to US officials' acknowledgment that the war contributed to Republican losses.
Many Iranian newspapers have followed suit, dwelling on America's economic and political troubles while portraying Iran as a country growing stronger despite the war.
"Ever-Stronger Iran on the Road to Progress," one economic daily declared on its front page on Thursday. Another proclaimed "American Humiliation Continues," alongside a photograph of a seemingly dejected Trump.
The hardline daily Kayhan highlighted what it described as €127 billion in European losses resulting from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, presenting the economic damage as a measure of Tehran's success.
Largely absent from those triumphant headlines was the economic crisis that matters most to ordinary Iranians: the soaring cost of living.
The labour-focused news agency ILNA offered a starkly different picture, reporting that the estimated cost of basic household necessities had nearly doubled in seven months to 85 million tomans a month, almost six times the monthly earnings of an ordinary worker.
Labour expert Hamid Haji-Esmaeili told ILNA that inflation had become "normalised" in the thinking of Iranian officials, criticising the government's inadequate response and calling for wages to be revised midway through the year.
Pay levels set at the beginning of the Iranian calendar year no longer reflected economic realities, he argued, warning that the crisis was no longer confined to low-income workers but also affected civil servants and large sections of the middle class.
Economist Ali Ghanbari, also quoted by ILNA, described Iran as facing a "livelihood crisis", warning of a severe decline in the purchasing power of lower-income households.
Another ILNA report highlighted delayed wage payments for contract workers in Iran's southern oil-producing regions, adding to the uncertainty facing employees already struggling with inflation.
Growing calls to expand food-support programmes suggest that wages alone are no longer sufficient to protect many households from the rising cost of essential goods.
Years of inflation, currency depreciation, sanctions and inadequate investment had already eroded living standards. Two rounds of war in 2025 and 2026, and the subsequent US blockade of Iran's maritime trade, have compounded those pressures.
The government's response has come under increasing criticism, particularly over its failure to adjust wages and pensions to reflect the rapidly rising cost of living.
Pensioners have been among the most vocal groups demanding action. ILNA reported calls for authorities to restore their purchasing power immediately, as housing, healthcare and other essential expenses consumed an increasing share of their incomes.
In another report, a representative of military pensioners' organisations criticised repeated discussions about wage increases that had produced no concrete results.
He warned against creating "false hope" among pensioners frustrated by promises of financial relief that have yet to translate into higher payments.
Pensioners are among Iran's more organised social groups and have staged repeated demonstrations in recent years over inadequate incomes and rising prices.
Yet the emphasis in hardline political rhetoric remains on the costs Iran has imposed on its adversaries.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its impact on international energy markets have been presented as evidence of Tehran's leverage over Western economies.
Such claims of success sit uneasily alongside accounts of hardship emerging from Iran's own media, where journalists operate under restrictions on reporting deemed damaging to the Islamic Republic's image.
For workers awaiting overdue wages and pensioners demanding relief, the economic pain inflicted on Iran's adversaries offers little consolation. Their immediate concern is whether they can pay next month's rent and put food on the table.
