Cattle Breeders In Iran Selling Livestock As Feed Prices Jump Sixfold
A cattle breeding farm in Iran
A sixfold rise in animal feed prices in Iran has brought about a wave of bankruptcy among cattle breeders, forcing them to sell their starving or half-dead cows at lower prices to slaughterhouses.
According to a report by Shargh Daily on Sunday, there are long queues of cattle at slaughterhouses as the supply is high and demand low due to the dire economic situation in the country.
The chairman of the Livestock Supply Council, Mansour Purian, said the livestock have become weak and lost a lot of weight, adding that such cheap cattle have a lot of customers in the Arab countries, so smugglers sell these half-dead cows to them to be fed on their equipped farms.
On the other hand, low purchasing power by Iranians has drastically reduced the demand for meat by as much as 50 percent in the past year, which has caused many small farmers to be eliminated from the supply chain.
Criticizing the government’s decision to increase livestock feed prices, Nasser Ostad-Ahmadi, the managing director of one of Iran’s largest farmers' cooperatives, told the daily that “in the history of Iranian animal husbandry, both before and after the revolution, it had never been seen that the government increases the price of a commodity sixfold overnight.
A hardliner newspaper in Iran has called for a “formidable blow” against Israel inside its territories, for Israeli operation in Iran and to restore Tehran’s credibility in the region.
In its Sunday issue, Resalat, a publication that belongs to Iran’s traditional conservatives with no direct link with military hardliners, has argued that repeated Israeli attacks in Iran have robbed the Islamic Republic of its image as a regional power.
The article presented at the top of the main page as a an “editorial note” and headlined “Strategic Patience Against Israel Is Meaningless”, has argued that the reason world powers negotiated with Iran was because they took it seriously as a regional power. With repeated attacks against targets inside Iran, Israel has aimed to raise doubts about the Islamic Republic’s power.
Resalat argues that previous Israeli attacks in Syria and elsewhere against Iranian officials and interests “were painful” but not as serious as attacks in “Tehran, Esfahan and Yazd.”
The paper is referring to what many are convinced are Israeli operations in Iran that started in July 2020 and inflicted heavy damage on key nuclear scientist installations and killed important figures, such as the top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in November 2020 in Tehran. These attacks were extremely complex operations, which showed that those behind it had infiltrated the country and possibly even the government and security agencies.
The attacks have indeed become painful for the clerical regime perhaps more for the political damage they have inflicted on the image of a ruling system that has failed economically and its only claim to power emanates from its extensive military and intelligence structures and their influence in other regional countries.
Resalat says that Israeli attacks have led to an atmosphere of insecurity in Iran and are aimed at portraying the government as weak in the region. It goes on to argue that with the power of its regional proxies and its ballistic missiles aimed at the heart of Israel, the Islamic Republic could project power in recent past, but now these levers seem to be inadequate, and a more powerful response is needed.
“The length and breadth of the Zionist enemy’s territory from Tel Aviv to Haifa and to its nuclear installations in Dimona are within the range of Iran’s precision missiles,” Resalat says. “Our allies from north and north-east to south-east dominate the occupied territories [Israel],” it goes on to say.
“There is no reason to doubt that Iran’s long arm should inflict a formidable and unexpected blow on the enemy to instill regret, and it is important to inflict simultaneous blows inside the occupied territories,” the hardliner paper says.
But the editorial note does not stop there. “Even inflicting blows against the interests of Israel’s allies, especially America and Britain is a proposal worth noting and one of the options on the table,” it says and adds, “One must punish the father so the child takes notice”.
Despite repeated statements from Israeli officials warning of impending Iranian attacks on its citizens visiting Turkey, Tehran has generally remained silent.
Israeli officials and media began issuing the warnings in the end of May and intensified alerts at the beginning of this week. Defense Minister Benny Gantz issued his latest statement on Saturday reiterating that there is a serious risk of attacks on Israelis in Turkey by Iranian networks.
“I call on all Israelis in Turkey to obey the instructions of the security forces,” Gantz said in a statement published by his office Saturday evening, adding, “Israel is working to thwart Iranian attempts to carry out an attack, and is preparing to respond forcefully to any attack on Israeli citizens — anywhere."
But Iranian officials have not directly responded to the serious accusations. Only Tasnim news agency affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard commented that the Israeli warnings to its citizens is “psychological war” against Iran.
Several individuals affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard have been killed or died mysteriously in recent weeks in Iran. These incidents are attributed to a covert war waged by Israel inside Iran. On Sunday, the hardline Resalat newspaper called for a hard response inside Israel to protect Iran’s reputation as a power in the region, but no mention was made of Israeli warnings about attacks in Turkey.
Gantz’s warning came two days after an Israeli media report on June 16 that Turkey bluntly warned Iran not to use its territory for anti-Israeli acts.
So far there have been no incidents, but Israeli officials have been insisting that they are in close cooperation with Turkish security agencies to thwart any Iranian threat.
Although Turkish officials have been generally silent about the threat, but this could be due to the timing of the Israeli warnings coming at the beginning of Turkey’s tourism season. However, Ankara has not denied warnings of an Iranian threat coming from Israeli officials and media.
The silence from Tehran, however, might be more telling. The Islamic Republic finds itself in isolation, after earlier this month the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors representing 35 nations, in a resolution passed with overwhelming majority criticized Tehran for lack of cooperation in an ongoing investigation of its past nuclear activities.
The debate in Iran now is about how to deal with the situation at hand and with a possible threat of more punitive actions by the United States and its European allies on the nuclear issue.
Moreover, Iran’s internal situation is becoming more precarious, with the economy seemingly in chaos and daily anti-government protests continuing since early May.
With strong public frustration over high inflation and government mismanagement, Iran’s leaders know that the people see this from the prism of their confrontational foreign policy. This could be one reason why they prefer not to remind the people of adventures abroad.
It is also possible that they know if they try to deny the Israeli accusations, information about the existence of a real threat might be revealed.
Israel channel 12 on Saturday reportedthat Israel’s Mossad and Turkish intelligence services had thwarted an attack over the past day, but no details or concrete source was mentioned.
“There are Israelis who were minutes from death and do not know it,” an unnamed defense official told Channel 13 news on Saturday according to Times of Israel. “Another day where we let out a sigh of relief that the attack did not happen.”
A physician who reportedly refused to cooperate in an alleged coverup following a deadly building collapse that killed scores of people in southwestern Iran has died mysteriously.
When a newly built high-rise building collapsed in the south-western city of Abadan on May 22, authorities first announced the arrest of its owner, but a day later they claimed he had died in the incident. The public did not believe the claim and many said that he escaped and corrupt officials who had allowed to him to violate building regulations, wanted him to disappear.
Officials reportedly introduced a badly mingled body to a local hospital demanding that Dr. Payvand Allameh pronounce the dead person as the owner of the building, but he refused to do that finding no conclusive evidence.
A month after the incident, Allameh died instantly after falling from the balcony of his eighth-floor apartment, raising fresh suspicions about foul play.
The head of Abadan University of Medical Sciences, Mohammad Mohammadi, said on Friday night that his death is being investigated, while some news agencies in Iran reported suicide as the cause of his death.
After a report revealed Iran’s construction of “a vast tunnel network” just south of its Natanz uranium enrichment plant, Iran says the move was to intensify security measures.
In an interview with Nour News, a website affiliated to the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, the spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran Behrouz Kamalvandi made the remarks on Friday in reaction to a report by the New York Times about the work at the underground nuclear facility purportedly able to withstand cyberattacks and bunker-penetrating bombs.
US officials told the Times that the new underground facility was to replace a centrifuge assembly plant that the Times said Israel blew up in 2020 “in a particularly sophisticated attack.”
Kamalvandi claimed that Iran had notified the UN nuclear agency of its plan to relocate the activities of the TESA complex in Karaj to the city of Natanz, saying that the transfer of some of the activities to an area near the Natanz nuclear site aims to prevent the recurrence of attacks, referring to last year’s sabotage at the TESA complex.
He said that said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been informed about it, even though Iran has no obligation to provide such information to the agency.
The complex in Karaj, on the outskirts of Tehran, saw a sabotage attack in June last year, which authorities blamed on Israel. The attack damaged surveillance cameras at the site.
Paraguay's intelligence chief has confirmed that one of the crew aboard a Venezuelan cargo plane grounded in Argentina has ties to Iran's Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force.
Head of the Paraguayan National Intelligence Secretariat Esteban Aquino told the country’s Spanish language digital newspaper ABC Digital Friday that despite claims by Argentina that no evidence links the case to the Quds (Qods) Force -- Tehran’s extraterritorial intelligence and secret ops outfit listed as a terrorist organization by the United States -- Captain Gholamreza Ghasemi did not merely share a name with a member of the group but is in fact the same man.
Reiterating the claim, Argentine Minister of Security Anibal Fernandez responded Friday that while the Paraguayan official "has his right to say whatever he wants... I'm not going to talk about conjecture... according to the official documentation, there is no specific relationship with terrorist organizations, according to all the databases."
The Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires also released a statement on Thursday, saying that the Boeing 747 was used by the Iranian company Mahan Air and transported “a group of Iranian officials, including a senior executive of the airline Qeshm Fars Air,” accused of transporting weapons for Hezbollah during the civil war in Syria.
Iran has denied that the Boeing 747 belongs to Mahan Airlines, sanctioned by the US in 2008 for links to the Quds (Qods) Force.
Ghasemi is also reportedly a relative of current Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi, whose appointment by President Ebrahim Raisi triggered condemnation from Argentina given his suspected role in the 1994 AMIA bombing that killed 85 people and injured over 300.
