How and when will Iran retaliate for Haniyeh's assassination?

Cyber security company XPOZ, through the use of a large-scale analysis of factual evidence and data that’s collected on social networks, came to the conclusion that Iran was behind the campus protests at McGill university in Montreal.

Analysts working for the American cyber company, which monitors social media, use AI technology to unmask the networks and campaigns behind “inauthentic” users interacting on a large scale. 

They dug deeper into inauthentic accounts, which could be defined as either bots or fake users managed by a foreign power, operating in a highly coordinated matter on social platforms. They said the coordination aspect is key because that’s how social media algorithms work to push a certain narrative. The analysts also used technology to investigate the content such users post.

What they found was that there was a high-percentage of inauthentic accounts primarily written in Farsi, coming from Iranians inside Iran linked to the regime and IRGC, fueling the campus protests at McGill. Analysts told Iran International they are confident based on analysis of which group inauthentic users belong to and the type of narrative they are producing over time within those groups.

XPOZ analysts, came up with their results after one month by identifying the language used in the posts, where it was coming from, and how much of it was coordinated among inauthentic accounts linking back to Iran.

Iran International is not identifying the XPOZ analysts by name for security reasons.

“The primary takeaway is that there is a massive activity, funded, coordinated and organized by a foreign government that is influencing Canadians in Canada and driving incitement to violence and real-world activity,” said one of the XPOZ analysts.

Their analysis of the alleged coordinated activity at McGill reveals 60 percent of Pro-Palestine campus protestors were not authentic online users. The data indicates the presence of coordinated Farsi-speaking accounts, suggesting a targeted campaign. By comparison, 75% of commentators critical of the encampment were authentic.

The data drew on nearly 150,000 posts on X, over 500,000 likes and more than 65,000 comments. The analysts emphasized that their data does not identify whether the Pro-Palestine protesters are aware or unaware of Iran’s alleged role and may be acting in good faith.

The analysts revealed to Iran International that the network driving the McGill protests had been promoting narratives supporting the IRGC and the government of Iran while proliferating rhetoric against Israel and US.

“When you look at something that is happening in Montreal, Canada, you expect most of the users to be writing in English or French. Or you would expect most of them to be primarily engaging in other posts in English or French. It’s natural to see other languages but up to a certain point. What we saw here were users that were primarily writing in Farsi or that their followers were writing in Farsi.”

They added the users were not Iranians living in Canada and not regular citizens in Iran but rather tied to the Islamic Republic.

“In addition to their history of what they were writing and what they were engaging with, we also see that they're highly intertwined with one another in the sense that they're following one another,” which the analysts said indicated coordination. 

“They share a very abnormally high proportion of followers amongst one another,” said another XPOZ analyst.

Foreign interference and national security

XPOZ analysts said their data demonstrate that Canada is subject to the use of deceptive mass influence campaigns coordinated by foreign governments, like Iran, to target Canadian society through proxies to deepen divides and threaten national security.

In June, Canada named Iran as one of the top four countries, along with China, Russia and North Korea, that engage in extensive campaigns to compromise government and private sector computer systems.

"Foreign interference, enabled by sophisticated cyber tools, poses one of the most serious threats to Canada’s national security, economic prosperity and sovereignty, as well as our way of life," the statement read.

In its annual report released in May, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) highlighted the cyber-attacks by the Islamic Republic that target Canada.

A foreign interference report also in May concluded that Iran, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, are key threats against Canada.

Iran International’s exclusive report comes on the heels of US intelligence report that Iran is funding and emboldening anti-Israel protests in the US to sow discord.

US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on July 9 that Iran harnessed social media to warp domestic debates and create more division. She issued an official statement warning that the Islamic Republic of Iran was boosting anti-Israel protests online.

Neil Oberman, a Canadian lawyer who recently represented students who filed an injunction against the McGill encampment, said the XPOZ data suggesting Iran’s role in the protests proves “foreign interference.”

“In Canada we do not tolerate and should not tolerate foreign countries interfering, meddling, creating disruption for the purposes of basically trying to influence young students who are the future of our country, from not being able to study, not being able to interact, and more importantly, not being able to be safe on their own campus,” he said.

Sources with XPOZ released the data to Oberman, who became the face of injunctions against the encampments in Canada.

Oberman said the students he represented were subject to aggression and hate on campus. The court had rejected his application, but he believes the outcome would have been different if he had the XPOZ documentation.

“Do I think for a moment that the courts would have known that evidence existed to establish that a foreign country with very evil intentions was attempting to influence good Canadians and Quebeckers so that they could fight with each other to have an encampment, I think the outcome might have been different, and I would even beg to say maybe McGill might have acted differently,” he added. 

In July, McGill's campus security dismantled the school's encampment.

Oberman said he’s bound by lawyer-client privileges and can’t discuss litigation but hinted that he will be using the evidence for a future legal proceeding.

“Evidence that does exist will be used. The form of its usage would probably be in the form of a legal proceeding.”

For Oberman, this is not an issue of antisemitism or the Jewish and Iranian communities but rather about Canada and the safety of all Canadians.

Critics say these flaws allowed an intricate intelligence network of infiltrators in the highest levels of Iranian security agencies to provide vital information to Israel to make a complex operation of this scale possible.

Israel has not taken responsibility for Haniyeh’s assassination but Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who holds Israel responsible for the killing has vowed to avenge it.

The conservative Jomhouri Eslami (Islamic Republic) newspaper on Thursday criticized the authorities for not heeding the many warnings about Israeli infiltration after other Israeli assassinations such as the killing of Iran's top nuclear man and Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) member Mohsen Fakhrizadehnear in Tehran in November 2020.

“The fact that the Zionist regime can lead its rocket through the window of Ismail Haniyeh’s bedroom in a highly guarded area of Tehran and martyr him only means that this criminal regime has infiltrators among us,” Jomhouri Eslami wrote.

“More important than taking revenge is blocking the enemy's paths of penetration through the air and on the ground and identifying and punishing their agents,” the newspaper said.

Jomhouri Eslami also reminded the authorities of the historical case of Eli Cohen, an Israeli spy who infiltrated the highest ranks of the Syrian military and government in the 1960s and called for a “fundamental clean up in intelligence and security agencies”.

Mansour Haqiqatpour, a former spokesman of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee also criticized the security and intelligence agencies in an interview with Rouydad 24 news website on Wednesday.

“Decisions must be made about some of our political, military, and security authorities some of whom must be sacked because of this incident,” Haqiqatpour, an IRGC general who served as Qasem Soleimani regional deputy in the Qods Force for over a decade, told Rouydad 24.

Jalal Sadatian, Iran’s former ambassador to the United Kingdom, also warned about the possibility of infiltration. “We have been bitten by [snakes crawling out of this] hole many times as in the assassination of nuclear scientists and other figures," he told the Iranian Labour News Agency (ILNA) Wednesday.

Israel has been blamed for the assassination of at least five Iranian nuclear scientists in and around Tehran since 2010 as well as several sabotage attacks on the country’s nuclear facilities.

In an interview with Israel's Channel 12 TV in June 2021, former Mossad chief Yosef ‘Yossi’ Cohen suggested that Israel was behind both the Fakhrizadeh killing and the April 11 2021 attack on the Natanz enrichment plant.

“The most smashing response to Israel [for Haniyeh’s assassination] is identification and neutralization of the agents that have infiltrated the system to the bone,” prominent reformist politician Mohsen Mirdamadi who also suggestively used the hashtag “Eli Cohen” tweeted Thursday. “Infiltrators are those whose Death to Israel cries reach as far as Tel Aviv,” he added.

In 2021, in an interview with reformist Jamaran news website, former intelligence minister Ali Younesi said all Iranian officials are at risk of being killed by Mossad. Younesi who served under reformist President Mohammad Khatami from December 2000 to August 2005 pointed out that rivalries between the Intelligence Ministry, the Intelligence Organization of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), and other security agencies had weakened them.

"Parallel organizations are busy fighting insiders rather than monitoring and confronting infiltrators," Younesi argued.

A video of the interview has been widely circulating on Persian-language social media and news websites since the announcement of Haniyeh’s assassination.

Videos of past interviews with Iran's former populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2021 have also been widely circulating on social media in which he warned about a “corrupt gang at the high level” of Iran's intelligence agencies.

Ahmadinejad claimed in one of the interviews that a top official of the intelligence ministry during his second term of presidency who was responsible for the Israel Desk, was executed for spying for Israel.

“Whoever claims that Israeli infiltration is limited to that one person in the intelligence ministry wants to conceal the existence of Israel’s infiltration network in Iran,” Ahmadinejad said.

At Pezeshkian’s endorsement ceremony Sunday, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said the selection of the cabinet is the “joint work of the administration and the parliament” and stressed that the cabinet should be formed as soon as possible.

Khamenei’s emphasis on the need to speed up the formation of the new government means two things, the ultra-hardliner lawmaker Ahmad Rastineh said Sunday: Pezeshkian should present his proposed cabinet to the parliament quickly, and while “cooperating” with the new president, the Parliament should approve those ministerial appointments that confirm with Khamenei's criteria, as quickly as possible.

Referring to reformists’ possible influence in Pezeshkian’s cabinet, Rastineh declared that the President should not consider himself aligned with a “certain political current”.

The so-called ‘Principlist’ majority of the 12th Parliament is divided into two major factions, hardliners who support the Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf and ultra-hardliners who fielded Saeed Jalili in the elections.

The two groups have diverged in the past few years and the umbrella term ‘Principlist’ which once defined all conservatives as opposed to ‘reformists’ no longer defines a united front.

The conflict between Ghalibaf and Jalili's supporters on social media during the parliamentary elections earlier this year significantly escalated when Jalili refused to allow Ghalibaf, who had a better chance against Pezeshkian, to represent the 'revolutionary front' in the presidential runoff elections in July.

Pezeshkian may manage to get some support from Ghalibaf’s faction which considers Jalili a much bigger threat than the reform-oriented Pezeshkian. After Ghalibaf lost in the first round of the presidential vote, many of his supporters openly supported Pezeshkian in the runoff election to prevent Jalili's victory.

It remains to be seen how likely Ghalibaf is to cooperate with Pezeshkian and steer his faction to protect him and his cabinet from Jalili’s ‘revolutionaries’.

“Mr. Ghalibaf ought to do everything in his power as the head of the legislature to prevent the radicals in the parliament from blocking the government’s path with their insistence on radical behaviors,” Gholam-Ali Jafarzadeh-Imanabadi, a former ‘Principlist’ lawmaker, said Sunday.

Jafarzadeh-Imanabadi argued that it is time for Ghalibaf to repay the favor to the parliament’s independent faction, of which Pezeshkian was a leading figure. Without their support, Ghalibaf would not have been re-elected as speaker of the 12th Parliament in March.

There are also two smaller groups of ‘Principlists’ in the parliament consisting of moderate conservatives and conservatives. These groups consist of the supporters of former President Hassan Rouhani, former Speaker Ali Larijani, the Islamic Coalition Party, and the Association of Combatant Clerics led by presidential candidate Mostafa Pourmohammadi.

These two groups have been eliminated from centers of power by hardliners and ultra-hardliners in the past few years and many among them cast their votes for Pezeshkian in the runoff elections. Ghalibaf can also get their support in helping Pezeshkian cabinet.

‘Principlist’ lawmakers make up more than two-thirds of the Parliament’s 290 lawmakers.

There are less than 100 ‘reformists’ and independents, mainly from smaller constituencies, whom Pezeshkian can also count on to support his proposed ministers.

Of Ebrahim Raisi’s nineteen ministers, only one was rejected by a sympathetic parliament in 2021. In contrast, hardliner and conservative lawmakers refused to endorse several of the ministers proposed by Hassan Rouhani during his two presidential terms in 2013 and 2017. However, reformist Mohammad Khatami managed to secure a vote of confidence for all his ministers from a conservative-majority parliament during his first term in 1997.

Neither its reported logistical support for the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, the attacks by the Houthis on ships in the Red Sea, nor the launch of six thousand rockets by Hezbollah towards Israel from October 8th, 2023, can obscure this reality.

In 2024, serious questions have arisen regarding the government's authority, which is typically demonstrated through organizing government-sponsored gatherings, ensuring insider cohesion and cooperation, maintaining essential public services, and supporting internal forces.

The state’s waning influence to mobilize

On July 26, the state attempted to stage a celebration of the mandated Islamic hijab in Tehran’s Azadi Stadium, which has a capacity of one hundred thousand. Despite extensive promotion through government propaganda outlets and the provision of free entry, transportation, and amenities for attendees, over 70% of the seats remained empty. This event not only highlighted a significant lack of public interest but also exposed the government's diminishing power to politically mobilize and demonstrate popular support for its policies.

Following that, the Muharram mourning ceremony, which commemorates the martyrdom of the Islamic Imam Hussein, was notably uneventful this year despite being primarily funded by municipalities. Previously a ten-day event, it was reduced to just two days, with fewer mourning tents in populous neighborhoods and a significant drop in attendance.

Overall, the state’s heavy-handed enforcement of Islamic practices and suppression of the population have had a counterproductive effect. Mosques across Iran have become less frequented and have lost their sense of community connection. The latest official numbers indicate that at least two-thirds of the country's mosques (50,000 out of 75,000) have been closed, and the number of worshippers has significantly diminished.

A fractured executive branch

The administration of President Ebrahim Raisi had such a seemingly indefensible track record that, after his sudden death in a helicopter crash, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his appointees in the Guardian Council allowed former Health Minister Masoud Pezeshkian and the “reformists” supporting him to enter the executive branch.

Despite the mistrust Khamenei almost certainly harbors for the “reformist” camp, he likely felt he had no choice but to turn back to them. He gave them enough room to campaign and reassured them with favorable statistics to encourage their participation in the executive branch.

This development unfolded while the chief editor of Kayhan, a newspaper under Khamenei’s direct management, described Pezeshkian’s colleagues in charge of selecting cabinet members as follows: "Most of the members of the Steering Council and its sub-committees are those who, in their records, are associated with the enemy's intelligence services, have security convictions, corruption, defense of homosexuality, disbelief in the system and revolution, alignment and association with the American, British and Israeli triangle, have been involved in seditions and riots, secretly meeting with the enemies of Iran in America and receiving instructions to create sedition in the country, [and] asking America to apply crippling sanctions against Islamic Iran.”

In his desperation to avoid another largely unpopular presidency, Khamenei has caused his once-unified executive branch to visibly fracture.

Infrastructure failures fuel growing discontent

The government’s failure to invest in and maintain infrastructure, coupled with inadequate public services, has heightened the risk of public protests. Issues such as power, water, and gas outages, along with potential increases in gasoline prices, have fueled growing discontent.

The number of power outages in the country, exceeding 50 per month, has now reached levels seen in failed and weak states such as Yemen and Niger.

According to Pezeshkian, gasoline imports have reached approximately $8 billion annually, a cost the government cannot sustain long-term without raising prices. Such increases could lead to public unrest similar to the November 2019 protests, where demonstrations over hiked fuel prices quickly turned into calls for regime change.

Rifts deepen in Khamenei’s top circles

In addition to other internal rifts, there have been notable internal conflicts within the top circles around the Supreme Leader.

One example of the internal tensions within Khamenei's inner circle is the July 8 edition of Jam Jam Daily. This newspaper, published by the state-owned TV and Radio Organization directly managed by the Leader, used Photoshop to remove Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei and Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf—heads of the judiciary and legislative branches—from a photo of Pezeshkian’s approval ceremony in Khamenei's office.

Additionally, the support for Pezeshkian from several of Khamenei's close associates, such as his bodyguard Vahid Haqqanian, along with the early resignation of numerous IRGC members, signals a growing distance between the original leaders of the Islamic Republic and the regime's more hardline elements.

Haniyeh, who had traveled to Tehran to participate in the inauguration of President Masoud Pezeshkian, was targeted in the early hours of Wednesday at a highly guarded compound at the foothills of high mountains in northern Tehran.

In a letter to the United Nations on July 31, Ambassador Amir Saeed Iravani described the attack as "a severe infringement on [Iran's] sovereignty" that violated international law.

"This rogue and terrorist regime and its accomplices bear responsibility. The Islamic Republic of Iran will not hesitate to exercise its inherent right to self-defense, as enshrined in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter to respond decisively and promptly.”

In letters to the United Nations in April, Iran used the same article as a basis for self-defense, before launching a missile and drone attack on Israel on April 13.

During that attack, Iran launched a volley of missiles and drones at Israel, claiming it was in retaliation for Israel's suspected deadly attack on its embassy compound in Damascus on April 1. However, nearly all of the projectiles were intercepted and shot down.

Denying the bombing scenario

IRGC-affiliated Fars news agency rejected on Wednesday a report by the New York Times about the assassination of Haniyeh, which said he was killed by an explosive device hidden in his room two months before the hit.

"These lies are being propagated while the results of the experts' investigation indicate that Haniyeh was struck by a projectile, in which involvement of the Zionist regime cannot be ruled out,” Fars said.

Iran's leadership has been clear about its intention to retaliate. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said Israel “martyred our dear guest in our house … and prepared the ground for a harsh punishment for itself.”

General Mohammad Baqeri, Chief of Staff of Iran's Armed Forces, on Thursday said, "The Zionist regime will undoubtedly regret it."Baqeri also noted that Tehran is currently deliberating on the appropriate response to avenge the assassination of Haniyeh.

Ali Akbar Ahmadian, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told Iran's semi-official Mehr news agency, "All fronts of the resistance will take revenge for Haniyeh's blood."

Senior leaders of Iranian-backed groups in the region met Thursday in Tehran to discuss plans to retaliate against Israel, Washington Post reported, citing two individuals briefed on the talks.

Khamenei was present at the meeting, which also included officials from Hezbollah, Iraqi militant groups and other armed forces allied with Tehran, the report said.

The Biden administration is confident that Iran plans to retaliate against Israel for the recent assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and is preparing measures to counter such an attack, according to three US officials who spoke to Axios.

The Thursday report also added that US officials anticipate any Iranian retaliation will follow a similar pattern to their April 13 attack on Israel but could be larger in scale. They suggest that the response may involve the Lebanese Hezbollah.

"The Biden administration is concerned it may be more difficult to mobilize the same international and regional coalition of countries that defended Israel from the previous Iranian attack because Haniyeh's assassination is in the context of the Israel-Hamas war, which has drawn sharp anti-Israel sentiments across the region," added Axios.

In a call between President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, the White House reaffirmed its unwavering support for Israel’s security against threats from Iran and its proxies, including Hamas. According to a readout released by the US, they discussed enhancing Israel’s defense capabilities, including deploying new military defenses.

Senator Lindsey Graham shared the readout on X saying that "it is always good for any American administration to reassure Israel that we have their back against Iran and their proxies and will provide the necessary defensive capability."

However, he argued that "it is long past time to start talking about offense when it comes to Iranian threats against Israel, the United States, and the world."