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The accounts of several journalists and activists - on both reformist and conservative camps - were exposed by the feature, triggering widespread backlash from ordinary Iranian internet users who struggle daily to access the web. The controversy quickly spread under the hashtags #LocationGate and #Whitelisted_Line”.

“I swear on my honor that I will never again be active on any social network without a VPN,” right-wing social media activist Amir Tanha wrote on Monday. “To all friends who became upset or disappointed with me: I give my word of honor that, as always, I will stand with the people."

“I request the relevant authorities to immediately restore my line back to the same state as the rest of the people of Iran,” he posted on X. “Please forgive me.”

Right-leaning journalist Behnam Abdollahi issued a similar apology, relinquishing his privileged access.

“Without any further explanation, I sincerely apologize from the bottom of my heart to all my dear compatriots and ask for your forgiveness,” Abdollahi posted on X.

“I request the relevant authorities to return my line to normal status. I give my word of honor that as a journalist I will never use any special privileges and will remain with the people. May God grant us all a good end," he added.

The apologies sparked thousands of replies, many mocking them as insincere.

“The ‘whitelisted SIM card’ is not the issue,” wrote user Hatef Salehi. “What sparked public outrage was the double standards of those posing as standing by the people.”

Fayyaz Zahed who until recently was a member of President Masoud Pezeshkian’s Information Council, posted an apology in the same tone.

“Now that I’ve seen how upsetting this is for people, I’ve asked my friends – since I’m no longer in the government – to make my line normal. I hope filtering is lifted.”

‘Orwellian discrimination’

Tehran-based whistleblower and journalist Yashar Soltani compared the privileged access to behavior of some characters in George Orwell's Animals Farm.

“Seeing the ‘whitelisted internet’ of officials – especially the hardliners who oppose free internet – reminded me of the pigs in Animal Farm. They enter through the main gate while people must climb over the wall," Soltani posted on X.

Freedom, when rationed, is no longer freedom; it is structural discrimination. White internet for 90 million Iranians!" he added.

Iran’s “White Line” or “white SIM cards” provide privileged, unfiltered internet access to select elites, officials and government loyalists, bypassing national censorship, according to journalists who enjoyed the privilege.

X (formerly Twitter) has been officially blocked for ordinary users in Iran since 2009, though many senior officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, maintain active accounts.

In July 2025, Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace approved tiered internet regulations, officially to empower “digital businesses,” but critics denounce the system as “digital apartheid” that rewards loyalty and deepens inequality.

The intensity of the reaction reflects a deeper public grievance with longstanding filtering policies.

Few understand the stakes better than former CIA case officer Reuel Marc Gerecht, a man who once risked his life to enter Iran on his own.

After four decades of watching the Islamic Republic from every angle - as a CIA officer, a historian and someone who smuggled himself into Iran just to see what it was really like - Gerecht’s conclusion about Iran today is stark.

“These people are not moving to Paris,” he said. “They are going down swinging.”

Tehran, he says, is fundamentally unstable, badly shaken by a US-Israeli war in June and deeply suspicious of intelligence penetration by its enemies.

“It has spiritually and perhaps bureaucratically dealt a death blow to the Supreme Leader,” he said, asserting that the stature of veteran theocrat Ali Khamenei who since the conflict has emerged in public more rarely is on the wane.

“I am very doubtful that the eighty-six-year-old gentleman is actually running the government now," he said. "His clones are. He has been effective replicating himself inside the system.”

The surprise Israeli air campaign in June appeared to expose broad intelligence failures and killed hundreds of military personnel and civilians.

Assassinations of top commanders need not have required many Israeli personnel or agents, said Gerecht, a former so-called Iranian targets officer who identified and recruiting Iranians to work for US intelligence.

“The number wouldn’t be that large,” he said.

Young men

Still, the impasse over Iran's disputed nuclear program festers despite US President Donald Trump's assertion that US attacks on nuclear facilities had "obliterated" it.

Khamenei and other top leaders have ruled out US conditions to restart talks even as US and international sanctions on Iran have deepened, driving up costs of living and undermining popular support for authorities.

“The regime cannot make a full recovery and they know that,” he said. “They know how many people dislike them intensely.” Yet as long as Tehran maintains “X number of young men willing to commit violence” on its behalf, it survives.

The United States, he said, is unlikely to seek Tehran's downfall by force.

“The unexpected could happen,” he said. “It is the unexpected that really scares them.” But he sees no serious external push for regime change. “Trump certainly does not have a regime change strategy,” he said. “The bureaucracies are always opposed to that.”

Given US reluctance to get embroiled in another Mideast adventure, any change to the nearly fifty-year-old Islamic system would come from within.

The "Woman, Life, Freedom" protest movement sparked by the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in 2022 was quashed with deadly force by security forces.

“Women can’t bring the Islamic Republic down," Gerecht said. "It has to be young men.”

Going rogue

It was the early 1990s and Iran was still emerging from revolution and a devastating war with Iraq when Gerecht made a decision few would dare.

Driven by a relentless desire to understand the country from within, he left the agency and paid a truck driver to hide him in a cramped storage compartment as they crossed the border from Turkey into Iran.

“They (the CIA) didn’t allow me to go inside Iran,” he said. “So I went rogue.”

In his view, the governing system has lost legitimacy but not its capacity for violence, and real change will only come from fractures among the men who enforce the clerical establishment, not from foreign pressure or peaceful transition.

Gerecht recalled an anecdote far from Iran. At a party in Moscow years ago, he asked a group of former and current KGB officers what had disturbed them most about their service. “They all said they got tired of lying to their children,” he recalled.

He wonders whether one day those inside Iran’s own security establishment might face that same reckoning.

“If that type of scenario is possible,” he said, “then you could conceivably have real change in the Islamic Republic.”

Until then, he sees Iran as a country full of contradictions and a clerical establishment determined to maintain its grip by force.

The festival was conceived by Dana Sameah, an Israeli of Iranian heritage who said in an interview with Iran International on Sunday that she hoped to create a bridge between Iran and Israel by founding the festival.

The two-day event, titled “Nowruz Fest,” is being held at the Sderot Cinematheque, located less than a mile from the Gaza border, and streamed on Facebook to allow potential viewers in Iran to watch, although many social media platforms are blocked inside the country.

Listed among the festivals' backers on its official website is the Tkuma Directorate, an Israeli government body which supports the rehabilitation of communities astride the Gaza Strip which were attacked on Oct. 7.

Sameah, born in Beersheba to Iranian immigrant parents, told Israeli outlet Times of Israel earlier this month that she grew up between the two cultures and hoped the festival could help bridge divides between “governments and people.”

She added that she wanted to send “a message from love” at a time when many Iranians worry about the future following a 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June.

She said she chose Sderot — a city still recovering from the Oct. 7 attack in which 72 residents were killed — to encourage Israelis to support cultural life in the western Negev.

“The festival is in Sderot because Israelis should go to the western Negev to support it after October 7,” Sameah was quoted as saying by Times of Israel.

“Things are calmer now, but when I would go to Sderot for meetings, there were the sounds of war in the background, and imagining that things would improve gave me hope,” she added.

The festival features five Iranian films, as well as performances of Persian music.

Screenings include two films by Tehran-based dissident director Asghar Farhadi — The Salesman, his Oscar-winning film, and A Hero.

The political thriller The Seed of the Sacred Fig Tree by exiled Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof is also being shown, alongside Reading Lolita in Tehran by Israeli director Eran Riklis and the animated film Persepolis, based on the graphic novel by Iranian-French artist Marjane Satrapi.

Israeli singer Rita is set to receive a lifetime achievement award for her work promoting Iranian culture, and Middle East scholar David Menashri will also be honored.

Hamas-led militants breached security barriers and infiltrated Israeli communities, killing 1,200 soldiers and civilians while taking over 250 hostages, both foreign and Israeli.

Israel responded by launching a full-scale war on Gaza, killing 46,000 people, according to Gaza health ministry data.

Kamran Ghazanfari said Russia and China would support Iran’s potential withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), adding that the move would increase the country’s “nuclear and military capability.”

"China and Russia support this decision (to withdrawal from the NPT). Medvedev, Putin’s deputy, even hinted indirectly that Russia is willing to provide Iran with nuclear weapons," he said in an interview with the Iran24 news outlet.

Medvedev, an arch-hawk who serves as deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, had written in a post on X in June that "a number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their own nuclear warheads."

US President Donald Trump had pounced on the comments, promptly saying in his own post on social media that Medvedev was "casually throwing around the 'N word' (Nuclear!), and saying that he and other Countries would supply Nuclear Warheads to Iran." The former Russian president quickly clarified that Moscow would not do so.

Iran’s parliament in May approved a 20-year strategic partnership with Russia. The agreement lacks a mutual defense clause but it commits both nations to military-technical cooperation, joint exercises, and coordination against shared threats.

Moscow offered Tehran little concrete support during a US-Israeli military campaign in June in which Iranian nuclear sites were attacked.

Iran denies seeking a nuclear weapon but Israel and Western countries doubt its intentions.

Ghazanfari's remarks come as another Iranian lawmaker on Saturday said Tehran is considering suspending or withdrawing from the NPT following a Western-backed resolution passed by the UN atomic watchdog last week.

Amir Hayat-Moghaddam, a member of parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee said the option is “on the table” and under expert review.

“Several meetings have been held since the IAEA Board of Governors adopted its anti-Iran resolution,” he said, adding a final decision could be announced by Tuesday.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is the main global accord aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, allowing peaceful nuclear activity under international supervision, and committing signatories to eventual disarmament.

Iran has been a party to the NPT since 1970. Officials in Tehran have described NPT membership as a sign of Iran’s commitment to peaceful nuclear energy, but they have also warned that continued political pressure could force a policy review.

Under the NPT, to which Iran, China and Russia are signatories, Iran is prohibited from receiving nuclear weapons. Nuclear-armed states such as Russia and China are barred from transferring them.

In comments sent to Iran International, residents described daily life under heavy haze in blunt, personal terms.

A resident of Urmia in northwest Iran said schools in Urmia and nearby Salmas were closed for two days because of dirty air. “They made us homebound and depressed,” the person wrote.

An Iran–Iraq war veteran with pulmonary injuries from Karaj said he had no choice but to keep working despite the smog. “Pollution is poison for me,” he wrote, “but if you miss one day of work, you fall behind for ten days.”

In Tehran, another resident said the air felt unbreathable. “They’ve turned Tehran into a gas chamber. You can’t catch your breath.”

Several other people echoed the same theme. “Breathing has become difficult,” one wrote, while another said, “There is a gray fog every morning. It feels like something is weighing on my chest.”

Parents and people with existing illnesses said they were hit hardest. One mother wrote: “My 17-year-old daughter has shortness of breath because of the pollution, and the doctor prescribed a spray.”

A marketing worker who said they have a lung condition wrote: “I have a lung problem and I can’t even speak up. Talking leaves me breathless.”

Another person reported persistent symptoms. “Long headaches and breathing trouble,” the message said, while another wrote: “My eyes burn so badly I can’t keep them open.”

• 

  Breathing the air that’s no more

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  Smog grips Iran’s big cities despite holiday shutdowns, orange alert issued

People blame industrial pollutants

Many users blamed a mix of vehicle emissions, industrial smoke and heavy fuel burning.

One message cited “non-standard gasoline, high-consumption cars, and mazut and diesel used for power plants and factories,” saying they produce “thousands of tons of toxic pollutants every day.”

A resident of Zanjan province, a smaller industrial area, alleged that nearby metal workshops release smoke at night. “The smoke looks like thick mist,” the person wrote, warning that the health damage “will show itself later.”

Another contributor said the problem had spread beyond big cities: “Pollution has reached a stage where even small towns and villages are not spared.”

Psychological toll

Alongside physical complaints, the comments conveyed mounting psychological strain.

“People’s moods are tense and abnormal, and it is affecting work and daily life,” one person wrote.

Another said, “We’re terrified of getting sick and not being able to afford treatment.”

Several linked the crisis to rising medical costs with one Tehran resident saying the pollution had triggered asthma-like allergies and that a prescription now costs millions of rials.

While some submissions used strongly political language, the core grievance was consistent: residents said they feel unprotected against a recurring hazard that closures and short-term restrictions have not solved.