Iran blames Israeli strikes in Lebanon on Western 'appeasement'

“The country’s greatest asset is its faithful and revolutionary people,” Rouhollah Momen-Nasab, head of Tehran’s headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, told reporters. “By activating 80,000 trained personnel, we can bring about major transformation in the province even before relying on large state budgets,” he said.

He announced the formation of a “chastity and hijab situation room” involving cultural and executive bodies, inviting citizens to join a network of local observers to help promote what he described as social discipline and religious values.

Momen-Nasab described the group’s response to what he called a “cognitive and cultural war” as data-driven and multi-layered, with monitoring and policy recommendations sent to relevant authorities. The organization, he said, will also push institutions through legal and audit channels to fulfill their “statutory duties.”

Momen-Nasab said the headquarters was coordinating with the prosecutor’s office and cyber police to monitor online and streaming platforms, warning that “virtual spaces and VODs must not be safe havens for lawbreakers.”

The renewed push comes as most Iranians continue to oppose mandatory hijab rules. A 2022 survey by Netherlands-based GAMAAN found more than 70 percent of Iranian men and women opposed compulsory veiling.

For Iran’s leadership, however, enforcement of hijab laws remains a pillar of political legitimacy. Since Mahsa Amini’s death in 2022, women appearing unveiled in public have turned defiance into a sustained act of civil protest.

In recent weeks, authorities have sealed cafés and restaurants across cities for noncompliance after outcry by hardliners. Police warned that all businesses “must observe current laws.”

Speaking at a conference in Tehran, Zarif said Russia has two “red lines” in its policy toward Iran — that the country should never enjoy normal relations with the world and should also not enter direct confrontation. “That is why Russia supported the Geneva interim agreement. It kept the wound open but prevented conflict,” he said, according to the official IRNA news agency.

Lavrov said earlier this week that the snapback provision — which allows the rapid return of UN sanctions if Iran breaches the agreement — was “largely Zarif’s creation” and a “legal trap” for Tehran.

Zarif said the snapback clause was added during the final stage of nuclear talks as a substitute for a far worse proposal from Russia and France. “Mr Lavrov and the French had suggested a very bad plan on the status of previous UN Security Council resolutions, and we worked hard to replace it,” he said, according to the official IRNA news agency.

He said the final mechanism, later included in the 2015 nuclear deal and endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231, was designed to prevent any single country from using its veto to block or extend sanctions.

Hardliners in Iran have long criticized Zarif for accepting the JCPOA’s snapback mechanism, viewing it as a concession that enabled the reimposition of UN sanctions.

Last month, France, Germany and the United Kingdom triggered the snapback mechanism, restoring UN sanctions on Iran over its nuclear activities after they accused Tehran of blocking inspections and rejecting diplomacy. The move came despite opposition from Russia and China.

Long mistrust

In a leaked 2022 interview, Zarif said Russia had tried to prevent the 2015 deal from being finalized, adding that “Russia made every possible effort in the final week to stop the agreement from being concluded.”

Zarif also accused Moscow this week of disclosing sensitive information about Iran’s military and diplomatic activities, including General Qassem Soleimani’s visit to Moscow and details of Iranian drone supplies to Russia for the war in Ukraine. “They were the ones who made those public,” he said.

Lavrov has said Russia has always supported the nuclear deal and the UN Security Council resolution that endorsed it. He said the final decision on the JCPOA “was made directly by Zarif and Kerry” and that other participants, including Russia, were observers.

The United States withdrew from the deal in 2018 during first President Donald Trump’s administration. In response, Iran gradually reduced its compliance and in 2019 began enriching uranium at higher levels.

Police reportedly shut down the popular clothing brand Gin West’s store on Farshchian Street in Tehran on October 10, one day after a mixed-gender private celebration.

The brand’s Instagram page was also blocked. The semi-official website Asianews Iran described the move as part of a broader campaign seeking “greater control over social spaces, combating displays of wealth, and stricter enforcement of moral laws.”

Business owners say Tehran’s message is clear: any public display of happiness, especially involving men and women together, will be treated as defiance.

‘Example for others’

The campaign follows a series of viral videos showing social events in urban centers, including a “coffee party” on Kish Island that drew sharp reactions from officials.

A female café owner in Tehran who has endured multiple police raids told Iran International that officials routinely demand exorbitant bail sums from detainees — often “billions of rials” regardless of their financial status.

“They want to make examples of us. They use our businesses as warning signs for others,” she said, adding that security forces appear particularly focused on gatherings involving young people.

Analysts say the regime’s anxiety stems from the fear that a single dance party could inspire a chain of similar acts of defiance.

‘Fear us constant’

Videos have surfaced on Iranian social media in recent weeks showing café owners in cities such as Dezful and Qom expressing remorse for hosting events with music or mixed dancing and urging customers to obey hijab laws to avoid punishment.

“These are not just moral warnings,” said a café employee in Tehran. “They are psychological operations. They want us to police ourselves and silence each other, especially women.”

He added that many business owners now censor themselves preemptively, refusing to host birthday parties or small music gatherings out of fear of closure. “They use sealing as a tool of intimidation,” he said. “The fear is constant.”

‘Genie is out of the bottle’

Beyond enforcing social codes, evidence suggests the state is using business closures as a weapon of political retaliation.

Information obtained by Iran International indicates that in at least two cases, authorities sealed businesses in Tehran because the owners or their relatives were involved in political or protest activities.

A café worker in Mashhad said the government believes harsh enforcement will discourage others from hosting social gatherings.

“They think sealing and arrests will stop people,” he said. “But every day there are more of these events. The genie is out of the bottle and it won’t go back in.”

In the absence of public spaces for leisure or free expression, modern cafés have become rare sanctuaries: informal hubs for art, conversation, and community among Iran’s youth.

By closing these spaces and criminalizing joy, the government risks deepening public resentment. The government may hope intimidation will restore its version of order, but its tactics appear only to fuel defiance.

As one café owner in north Tehran put it, “Every time they close a door, another one opens. You can’t ban happiness forever.”

For eighty-four years, he lived between art and truth and chose the latter as his art.

When he could no longer make films because Iran's theocratic system would not let him, he endured in silence. That moral stillness, that refusal, will grant him a kind of immortality no monument could.

It might sound sentimental, but it’s no small thing to hold on to principles that offer no promise of survival: to keep saying no to censor when yes could buy you comfort.

Most people take the deal and call it success. For Taghvai, success meant honesty, even if it meant silence. He chose to stop working than betray the essence of his work and bow to censors.

For years, he chose quiet over compromise, teaching instead of directing, living modestly but faithfully to an idea of cinema that no longer seemed to belong to this world.

'Found freedom' in death

Taghvai died on October 14, 2025. The modern world—obsessed with visibility, market value, and the algorithmic myth of individuality—has little patience for those who stand apart.

Everyone believes they are unique; artists are sure of it. But there is a difference between those who merely believe it and those who live it. Most pass through history collecting, as Andy Warhol once put it, their fifteen minutes of fame.

Others—those like Nasser Taghvai—shape history from within.

His wife, the filmmaker Marzieh Vafamehr, announced his passing with a single, luminous sentence: “Nasser Taghvai, the artist who chose the difficulty of living free, has found freedom.”

That line captures him entirely: liberation through honesty, not survival through compromise.

The smell of oil and the sea

Taghvai was born in 1941 in Abadan, a city poised between refinery and sea—between modernity and tradition. The geography of the south shaped his eyes: the heat, the salt, the rhythm of labor and myth.

He studied Persian literature at the University of Tehran, but it was life, not books, that made him a filmmaker.

His early documentaries of the 1960s, such as Wind of Jinn (1969), were meditations on fear, faith, and freedom. For him, cinema was never entertainment; it was knowledge in motion. He helped forge the Iranian New Wave, replacing sentimentality with silence, rhythm, and thought.

In Tranquility in the Presence of Others (1970), he dissected authoritarian family structures so precisely it was banned. In Sadegh Kordeh (1972), he brought Iran’s forgotten peripheries to the center. In My Uncle Napoleon (1976), he revealed—through humor and tenderness—a society haunted by its own mistrust.

After the 1979 Revolution, in a suffocating climate of censorship, he made Captain Khorshid (1985), a southern reimagining of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. A parable of courage and dignity, it won the Locarno Prize and remains one of Iran’s cinematic masterpieces.

Later came Hey Iran, a satire that turned laughter into rebellion, and Paper Without Lines, a meditation on imagination and identity.

“When I cannot tell the truth, I don’t make films”

His final project, Bitter Tea, about the Iran–Iraq War, was shut down. His response was austere and unforgettable: “When I cannot tell the truth, I don’t make films.”

For Taghvai, not making a film was itself an act of art—a decision against deception.

Across his work, one theme persisted: resistance to power and deceit. In Tranquility in the Presence of Others, madness defies authority.

In Captain Khorshid, honor resists betrayal. In Hey Iran, laughter dismantles militarism.

His cinema was intellectual yet humane, philosophical yet popular. He never mocked his audience; he invited them to think.

“The camera is not just an eye; It’s a conscience”

Taghvai was not only a filmmaker but a teacher of filmmakers. For him, cinema was not a profession but a way of perceiving. Generations of Iranian directors learned from his credo “the camera is not just an eye—it’s a conscience.”

He lived between presence and absence: present in his images, absent in his long silences. He refused to lie for visibility, to flatter power for memory, or to compromise for survival. “Art that isn’t honest isn’t art,” he once said.

In a world where art is often reduced to advertisement, he proved that honesty is the hardest, most enduring form of resistance. Even in stillness, he made the loudest noise.

His death is not just a farewell to a filmmaker. It is an invitation to remember that independence in art means standing against power without shouting — to be quiet, and yet remain unforgettable.

“The core issue is neither nuclear energy, nor human rights nor other apparent matters; the real aim is sovereignty and governance, the ancient conflict between tyrants and prophets,” Abdullah Haji-Sadeqi said in a speech in the holy city of Qom.

The remarks, a day after a key foreign policy aide to Khamenei ruled out US demands on reining in Iran's regional military activities and missile capacity, suggest Iran's 86-year-old ultimate decision maker maintains a hardline stance opposing any detente.

“The Leader of the Revolution said the whole dispute is that America says Iran must obey us. We, the Iranian nation, must properly understand this truth,” Haji-Sadeqi said. “If nuclear energy, human rights, or other issues are mentioned, all of these are merely tools to achieve that main goal.”

Trump administration earlier this year gave Iran a 60-day ultimatum to reach a nuclear deal, demanding it end all domestic uranium enrichment. Tehran denies seeking a weapon and sees enrichment as a right.

On June 13, the 61st day since US-Iran talks began, Israel launched a surprise military campaign which killed nuclear scientists along with hundreds of military personnel and civilians.

On June 22, the United States joined the fighting with strikes by B-2 bombers and submarine-launched missiles on three Iranian nuclear sites which US President Donald Trump has repeatedly said "obliterated" the country's nuclear program.

Iran denies seeking a nuclear weapon and has condemned the attacks as a violation of its sovereignty and international law.

Rights groups have criticized Tehran's rights record, as Iran has executed at least 1,172 people this year according to the US-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran.

Amnesty International reported that between January and September 2025, Iran executed more than 1,000 people — the highest number in three decades — marking a 75% increase in the first four months alone (343 compared with 195 in 2024).

At least 404 executions have taken place since the June Israel-Iran war, according to the human rights organization Hengaw.