Week of August 3, 2026 | Iran Unfiltered is a digest tracking Iranian politics & society by the National Iranian American Council
- Pezeshkian’s Two-Year Report: War Survival, a Reckoning Over January’s Dead, and an Economy Still “Sinking”
- Iran and Oman Reach Understanding on New Hormuz Corridor, But Say the Strait Isn’t Reopening
- Jailed Activists and Reformist Clerics Step Up Opposition to Iran’s Execution Wave
- Pezeshkian Says He Will Not Resign, and Denies a Rift With the Leader
- Why Iran’s Supreme Leader Has Not Been Seen or Heard in Five Months
- Trump Calls Off Strikes as Iran and Oman Discuss Strait of Hormuz
Pezeshkian’s Two-Year Report: War Survival, a Reckoning Over January’s Dead, and an Economy Still “Sinking”
President Masoud Pezeshkian marked two years in office with a televised interview that has so far run in two installments, covering wartime survival stories, the economy and – in its most consequential passage – the death toll from January’s nationwide protests. State television IRNA aired the first part on August 5 and the second on August 6. Further installments may follow. The tone has shifted sharply based on the subject: solemn and defiant on the war, evasive on economic delivery and openly combative on the crackdown.
On the war, Pezeshkian’s message was simple: no outside power can break Iran as long as the public stays with the government. He listed sanctions, a banking blockade, war and a naval siege as compounding pressures and said that when the government stands with the people, “no power can pin us down.” He credited survival not to displays of loyalty but to Iranians who held grievances and stayed off the streets anyway.
On the Islamabad MoU negotiations with the U.S., Pezeshkian disclosed the internal vote behind the deal: 12 of 13 council members present approved the memorandum framework, and Mojtaba Khamenei had said he would accept any proposal backed by three-quarters of the council. On his relationship with the new Supreme Leader more broadly, Pezeshkian was unusually candid: contact is now “very difficult.” Mojtaba Khamenei has not appeared in public since taking over in March. The admission came in the same broadcast where Pezeshkian denied a competing story that had circulated for days: that he had threatened resignation 28 times and been warned the next attempt would be accepted. Both his office and the Leader’s office called that account false.
The sharpest moment came when Pezeshkian addressed the January 2026 protests, disputing the highest casualty figures while defending his own government’s count. He said he still cannot forget the deaths and injuries and that things should never have reached that point. Then, almost in the same breath, accused Washington of arming protesters and called anyone citing tolls of 30,000 or 40,000 dishonorable and traitorous. The record he was disputing is one of the most contested in the Islamic Republic’s history. Iran’s government has put the toll at 3,117 and published a named list of 2,986 victims, attributing the shortfall to unidentified remains.
By contrast, HRANA, a widely-cited independent monitor, has published reports indicating more than 7,000 deaths, including 236 minors and 207 security-related forces. HRANA has published names and case details for more than 4,000 of the deceased, noting that they “deemed additional information inappropriate for public release at this time due to security and protection concerns.”.
Claims running from 12,000 to 50,000 killed have circulated from Iran International, U.S. officials and Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, who has cited “activists, political prisoners, and medical authorities” inside the country. Yet, there are no matching casualty records attached to these claims, and they are far from the more substantiated figures. None of the counts have been independently verified end to end, complicated by the severe restrictions on access and repeated internet blackouts during the crackdown.
Pezeshkian’s framing drew a direct rebuttal from Mehdi Mahmoudian, a reformist activist and former political prisoner, who argued the dispute over numbers doesn’t erase the crime. Writing in response, Mahmoudian said that even accepting the government’s own figures, the country is still left with thousands of dead citizens – people with names, families, and a right to life – and that no argument over the count clears anyone of responsibility for the killings. He asked why raising the dead is branded treason while ordering, enabling, justifying, or concealing their deaths is called patriotism, and pressed Pezeshkian to answer who gave the order, who fired, and who concealed the truth, rather than insulting the victims’ families. He closed by asking, “if speaking of the people’s blood is betrayal, what should killing them be called?”
Pezeshkian also revisited talks with the late Ali Khamenei over Iranians stranded abroad, arguing entry bans should be stated up front rather than enforced after the fact. People shouldn’t be let into the country and then detained and blocked from leaving again, he said, calling that practice dishonorable, without naming specific cases.
On the economy, Pezeshkian offered his bluntest language yet about the resistance he says his own government faces from within the system. Forty-seven years into the Islamic Republic, he said, Iran still wants to act properly on water, power, gas, and fuel, but every time, someone says now isn’t the time. He said privatizing Iran Khodro triggered an impeachment attempt against his economy minister, and that the same pattern repeats with every personnel change: critics never credit him with removing someone corrupt, only with pushing out someone deemed loyal. He argued Iran’s Social Security Organization owns enough factories that it shouldn’t struggle to cover members’ medical bills, and said hiring should reward competence over political or religious credentials.
He said gasoline reserves at three sites in Tehran were struck during the war but the country avoided a visible shortage, crediting provincial-level crisis management rather than any centralized fix. Mazandaran absorbed one to three million displaced people during the fighting without running short of bread, fuel, or basic goods, he said, because local administrators coordinated directly rather than waiting on Tehran – the model he’s calling the first step of his reform push. He put the country’s daily winter gas shortfall at 230 million cubic meters and said roughly 7,000 megawatts of power now comes from solar panels installed since his government inherited a system with reserves that wouldn’t last past autumn. He confirmed Saipa will follow Iran Khodro into privatization, and said Ayandeh Bank’s dissolution passed without public backlash because it was coordinated with the judiciary and parliament.
On subsidies, he promised to raise the value of the kalabarg food card but blamed currency shortages for limiting how far that can go, without offering a timeline. He also claimed a foreign-backed plan to seed unrest from Iran’s northwest and southeast borders during the war had failed because neighboring governments refused to let people cross to cause trouble, a claim relayed on state television and not independently confirmed.
Beyond Mahmoudian, the domestic pushback so far has focused on delivery rather than legitimacy. Commentators noted that while Pezeshkian detailed two state automakers going private, he never explained why car-import liberalization – a signature 2024 campaign promise that needs nothing more than a government circular to implement – still hasn’t happened. No hardline voice has directly challenged his account of the January crackdown. Itis a former political prisoner, not a rival faction, who has pressed him hardest on the crackdown and his framing of it.
The throughline across both installments so far is a president asking the public to trust him, even as the public weathers unprecedented challenges in the wake of lingering division triggered by yet another bloody crackdown.
Iran and Oman Reach Understanding on New Hormuz Corridor, But Say the Strait Isn’t Reopening
Iran and Oman have reached an understanding on the coordinates of a new, temporary shipping corridor through the Strait of Hormuz, though officials in Tehran say this does not amount to reopening the strait. Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, told IRNA on August 5 that three weeks of talks with Muscat had produced agreement on nearly every element under discussion, including the map of inbound and outbound routes, and that the two sides are now finalizing a joint statement. Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said the same day that the geographic coordinates of the route both sides have in mind have been agreed, and that the joint statement could be released “if third parties do not interfere.”
The proposed arrangement closes both existing temporary routes and replaces them with a new corridor. According to Gharibabadi, the northern route near Larak Island and the southern route through Oman’s internal waters – both established as strictly temporary arrangements – will be closed. The new route runs largely through Iranian territorial waters on the inbound leg and partly through Iranian waters on parts of the outbound leg as well, with the remainder passing through Omani waters. In practice, this means both inbound and outbound traffic passes at least partly through Iranian territory, giving Tehran a sovereign hand over the corridor. Reuters, citing a senior Iranian official and two regional officials, reported the arrangement would give Iran control over vessels entering the Gulf, describing it as among the largest concessions extended to Tehran to date. A Rokna report citing Gharibabadi said the temporary route could remain in place for two to four months or longer, pending a second phase of talks toward a permanent arrangement.
Tehran and Muscat insist the deal is strictly bilateral and does not involve Washington. Gharibabadi said third-country involvement in the arrangements is not accepted. Iranian state broadcaster IRIB, citing an informed official, said the talks concern “purely Iranian-Omani” transit arrangements and that even with an Iran-Oman deal, the strait will not reopen unless the United States halts what Tehran calls its violations. On the other side, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week a deal to reopen Hormuz could be close, and President Trump has repeatedly called an agreement imminent, claims Iranian outlets have denied. Whether informal US-Iran contacts are occurring alongside the Iran-Oman track remains disputed and unverified.
Two Iranian officials made statements last week that are easy to conflate but address different things. Asked directly by Khabaronline whether a US return to its Islamabad MoU commitments would be the condition for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, Gharibabadi said it would be a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. As Iran has faced what he called a “breach of commitment and violation of obligations” by the United States, that breach “ultimately has to be resolved somewhere.” It remains unclear whether this could take the form of a new formal commitment or some other form of assurance.
Gharibabadi’s emphasis, in other words, was less about the U.S. formally rejoining the MoU in name than about Tehran needing credible proof that Washington will actually implement steps this time, given the past track record of violations. Baghaei’s separate remark – that the Iran-Oman corridor deal “by itself” does not mean the strait has become secure – was about a narrower point: even a finalized bilateral understanding with Muscat cannot neutralize what Tehran calls the destabilizing factor – the U.S. naval blockade – which exists independently of anything Iran and Oman agree on.
The hardline paper Kayhan reported that Mojtaba Khamenei’s office permitted the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding in June only on condition that Pezeshkian preserve Iran’s rights and those of the “resistance front,” and stating that the Leader’s office would be “waiting” to see those conditions fulfilled. Kayhan’s August 3 column attacked Pezeshkian for “continuing to insist” on implementing what it called a “torn-up” agreement, arguing that none of the conditions tied to his signature were met before Washington declared the MoU over. Gharibabadi, separately, has said Iran halted all of its own obligations under the MoU once the US did the same, and accused American forces of pressuring commercial vessels to shut off radar and navigation systems to force them onto the disputed southern route. Read together, this suggests Tehran’s bottleneck is less a refusal in principle to reengage with the MoU than the absence, in its view, of any mechanism to guarantee Washington won’t abandon it again.
Domestically, hardliners have mobilized against any arrangement touching Iranian waters, citing sovereignty. MP Hosseinali Haji-Deligani told Didban-e Iran that surrendering “a centimeter” of Iranian waters in any agreement would violate the constitution and would require approval by four-fifths of parliament. Moreover, he said a group of MPs is compiling documentation with an aim of impeaching Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. This follows an earlier statement from the presidium of the Assembly of Experts branding any talk of accommodation as treason. Still, the diplomatic track – run through the Foreign Ministry and the Supreme National Security Council – has so far retained control of the file.
Two competing and not necessarily contradictory explanations have circulated for why Trump called off the large-scale strike he had threatened against Iran last week. The first, reported by the Washington Post, CBS and CNN citing unnamed sources, holds that concern over dwindling stocks of precision munitions and air-defense interceptors – particularly Patriot and THAAD systems – factored into the decision. CNN’s report indicated that the US military has expended nearly 80 percent of its THAAD interceptor stockpile. Trump has called these reports “fake news” and threatened leakers with lengthy prison sentences;.
The second explanation, reported by AFP and Reuters citing informed sources, holds that Iran warned Gulf states it would strike US assets and regional energy infrastructure in retaliation for any renewed attack, and that if the US targeted Iran’s power grid, Tehran would “plunge the entire region into blackout.” Backing up this threat, Iran reportedly shared a target list with regional governments. Araghchi, per the same reporting, asked Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and Pakistan to press Trump to call off a new strike. Trump subsequently held a call with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, in which the Saudi head of state reportedly pressed the President to hold off on this escalation.
Alongside the Hormuz standoff, a separate maritime war between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia continues to squeeze another global energy chokepoint. The Houthis declared a maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia on July 22 and, according to military spokesman Yahya Saree, have since struck at least nine Saudi tankers, including the Wafa and Daisy near Yanbu and the Gulf of Aden. According to India’s shipping minister, an Indian-flagged cargo vessel sank off Yemen’s coast after being struck by a drone, with all 14 crew rescued before it sank. The maritime intelligence firm Windward reported that over the same period, 22 China-linked vessels transited Bab al-Mandeb and berthed at Saudi ports without incident, a pattern the firm described as an apparent exemption for Chinese-flagged shipping. Kpler analyst Matthew Wright said the threat to crude shipping in the region is now at its worst point since the crisis began, with Kpler data showing traffic through the Strait of Hormuz falling from more than 100 vessels a day before the war to fewer than ten a day now. Saudi Arabia has leaned on its East-West pipeline and Yanbu terminal on the Red Sea for exports, though that route is now threatened by a partial Houthi blockade.
This week’s immediate outcome is not a reopened Hormuz but a pending negotiated corridor. Even if the joint Iran-Oman statement is released as planned, the larger questions – the fate of the US naval blockade, the nuclear file, Israel’s Lebanon obligations under the Islamabad MoU, and Iran’s frozen assets – remain, by Tehran’s own account, deferred to a later and undefined stage, contingent on assurances neither side has yet found a way to make credible to the other. Until then, the cost of the standoff falls on those with no say in it: the crews navigating two contested waterways, the residents of southern Iran who have absorbed the heaviest strikes, and global energy markets that shed or gain billions in value with every shift in optimism or pessimism about Hormuz.
Jailed Activists and Reformist Clerics Step Up Opposition to Iran’s Execution Wave
Published August 6, 2026
A growing chorus of Iranian political prisoners, reformist clerics, and human rights advocates is speaking out against Iran’s escalating use of the death penalty. Though they come from different backgrounds and make different arguments – legal, religious, political, and humanitarian – they are all warning that the country’s expanding execution campaign is deepening divisions rather than delivering justice. Their interventions come as executions have surged in the aftermath of the war with the United States and Israel, with many of those facing death sentences accused of violence against security forces amid involvement in the January 2026 protests.
The strongest statement so far came from imprisoned reformist politician Mostafa Tajzadeh, who released a message from Evin Prison on August 3. Tajzadeh acknowledged that Iran had weathered significant external pressure during the war, but argued that the country now needs reconciliation, not another cycle of repression. Executing mostly young defendants after what he described as opaque and flawed trials, he warned, risks repeating the same mistakes that have repeatedly fueled public anger instead of restoring stability.
Tajzadeh did not argue against accountability for violence. Instead, he insisted that accountability requires fair and transparent justice. He called for an independent fact-finding commission into the January 8–9 events, public trials, access to independent lawyers, and a form of restorative justice that respects the rights of defendants, victims, and their families alike. In his view, executions neither deter future violence nor heal society’s wounds. Instead, they deepen mistrust between the state and the public while perpetuating a cycle of retaliation.
A different but complementary critique came from reformist theologian Hassan Yousefi Eshkevari, who grounded his argument in Islamic jurisprudence rather than politics. In a July 30 essay, Eshkevari argued that Islamic law requires punishments to serve justice and the public good, standards he believes Iran’s current use of the death penalty fails to meet.
He argued that qisas – or retributive justice – was originally intended to limit private revenge, not encourage it, and that capital punishment can only be justified when due process, proportionality, and reliable evidence are fully respected. Eshkevari questioned whether Iran’s judiciary meets those standards, particularly in cases relying on confessions allegedly extracted under psychological or physical pressure. He also noted that many executions – especially in drug-related cases – have historically reflected security policy more than traditional Islamic jurisprudence. While stressing that he was speaking generally rather than judging individual cases, he repeated his longstanding criticism of what he has previously called the Islamic Republic’s transformation into a “Republic of Death.”
Three other prisoners held in Evin – Abolfazl Ghadyani, Mohammad Najafi, and Reza Valizadeh – offered a more explicitly political critique in a joint statement released around July 29–30. The veteran dissident, human rights lawyer, and Iranian-American journalist jointly argued that authorities are using executions to rebuild political authority after the war, portraying the death sentences as instruments of state power rather than justice. Their statement came shortly after two more defendants were executed on July 28 in the Isfahan “Alikhani Square” case, bringing the total number executed in that case to four, while eight others remain on death row.
The broader debate has also expanded to the government’s handling of the January crackdown itself. After President Masoud Pezeshkian criticized those citing estimates of 30,000 to 40,000 deaths, imprisoned activist Mehdi Mahmoudian argued that focusing on the exact number misses the central issue. Even by the government’s own figures, he wrote, thousands of people were killed and deserve accountability. He questioned who gave the orders, who carried them out, and who concealed what happened, arguing that those seeking answers are branded traitors while those responsible have faced little scrutiny.
Longtime journalist and human rights advocate Emadeddin Baghi remains one of the most influential voices behind this broader movement. For decades, Baghi has documented executions in Iran and argued against capital punishment from within an Islamic legal framework. Many of the arguments in Eshkevari’s recent essay build directly on that work. A campaign launched after Baghi’s Panorama interview earlier this year has likewise focused on improving judicial transparency by calling for the publication of death sentences and opportunities for retrials, rather than the swift implementation of executions.
These domestic concerns closely mirror those raised internationally. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk recently warned of the sharp increase in executions, saying at least 56 people have been executed on national security charges since March 19, including 27 connected to the January protests, while more than 100 others remain at risk. Amnesty International has similarly warned that at least 60 people face imminent execution, including three people who were minors at the time of their alleged offenses.
Taken together, these statements point to an increasingly coordinated challenge to Iran’s post-war execution campaign. Although the critics approach the issue from different perspectives – constitutional rights, Islamic jurisprudence, political reform, or international human rights – they arrive at much the same conclusion: Iran’s judiciary is moving quickly to carry out irreversible punishments through proceedings that critics argue fall short of basic standards of fairness and due process. However, this growing pressure from inside and outside Iran to halt and slow executions faces a judicial system that has long defied public pressure and accountability.
Pezeshkian Says He Will Not Resign, and Denies a Rift With the Leader
Published August 4, 2026
President Masoud Pezeshkian used the second anniversary of his government to rule out leaving office. Iranian state media released excerpts on Tuesday, August 4, from a video address titled “Report to the People,” due to air in installments on IRIB. In the released portion, Pezeshkian said that if he ever decided to resign he would announce it himself, that he will not resign and will stand firm, and that his administration is completely coordinated with the armed forces. He said the rumors were meant to manufacture a split — the impression that the Leader says one thing and his government says another. In the version carried by IRNA, he added that everyone knows the armed forces would stand with the Leader if any disagreement arose.
The statement answers a claim made two days earlier by a cleric who holds no office. Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi, secretary-general of a group called Hezbollah of Iran and the brother of the wife of Masoud Khamenei — a younger brother of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei — said in a video carried by Tabnak on Monday that Pezeshkian had resigned or threatened to resign 28 times, and that the Leader had written that if the president did it once more, the resignation would be accepted. Kharrazi said the message had been formally conveyed, and that Pezeshkian no longer dared. He also claimed the Leader intended to replace Mohammad Bagher Zolqadr as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.
The Leader’s office denied the account without naming him. In a statement from its public relations department, the office said quotations attributed to the Leader had been circulating online, that these were causing public agitation and sowing division, and that the specific claim about his response to a letter from the president was false and contrary to fact from its foundation. The statement said the only authoritative outlets for messages, news and material attributed to the Leader are the official website of his office and the institute for the preservation and publication of his works.
The presidency issued its own denial hours before the video excerpt appeared. Mehdi Tabatabaei, deputy for communications at the president’s office, wrote on X that the resignation claim was baseless and outright false, and described what he called a sinister coalition of lying whisperers and partisans of extremism and imprudence targeting national cohesion. The presidency separately rejected the figure of 28 resignations.
The underlying report is months old and has never been confirmed. On May 31, Iran International — a London-based outlet aligned with the opposition, citing an unnamed source — reported that Pezeshkian had sent a formal letter to the Leader’s office asking to step down, arguing that the IRGC had taken control of key parts of government and that his administration had been excluded from major decisions since the war began in February. Officials denied it at the time. The pattern predates the war: Executive Vice President Mohammad Jafar Qaem-Panah dismissed similar reports as rumors in November 2025, and Pezeshkian himself denied stepping-down reports in February 2025. When the story resurfaced roughly two months ago, Tabatabaei said resignation was not in Pezeshkian’s nature and that conditions in the country did not leave him room to think about it, while chief of staff Mohsen Haji-Mirzaei said there was no gap between the president and senior IRGC commanders, and that decisions in joint sessions had been taken unanimously.
What is new is that the dispute has become an argument inside the conservative camp specifically. The hardline former lawmaker Hamid Rasaei suggested Pezeshkian resign in order to test whether Kharrazi’s account was true. Mojtaba Zarei, a member of the Majles National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, dismissed Rasaei’s jab, noting that out of 90 million Iranians only one man had come forward to vouch for Kharrazi’s claim. Ali Asghar Shafieian, an adviser to the presidency and founder of Ensaf News, wrote that Kharrazi has neither met the Leader nor has any channel to him and is known for unusual accounts, pointing out that Kharrazi had previously accused Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi of a hand in the assassination of Ali Khamenei. Raja News, close to supporters of the late president Ebrahim Raisi, ran the claim under a headline describing a decisive answer from the Leader to a resignation performance.
The episode is legible mainly as a problem of verification. Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen or heard in public since taking office in March; his positions reach the country as written statements, and Araghchi said in a July interview that he had never met him and did not believe more than one or a few people had. In that condition, a claim relayed by a relative with no institutional role can occupy a political week and require public statements from both the president’s office and the Leader’s office. The denial from the Leader’s office was, in substance, a reminder that only two websites may speak for him — an assertion of channel control rather than of content.
The fight over resignation sits on top of a fight over negotiations. Pro-government rallies held nightly since the war began have criticized Pezeshkian and Araghchi over talks with Washington. A letter attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei said that he had in principle held a different view of the memorandum of understanding with the United States, but permitted its signing after Pezeshkian accepted responsibility for it — a formulation that assigns the president both the authority and the blame. Pezeshkian has since described the memorandum as the product of the Supreme National Security Council’s collective judgment rather than his own initiative, and the presidium of the Assembly of Experts has warned in severe terms against the diplomatic track.
On the same day, the president restated his position on the war itself. Pezeshkian said Iran is not seeking to continue or expand the conflict, called war a disease, and said the country would defend its limits against any threat. His comments came as President Trump said negotiations with Iran were underway and Tehran denied that any talks with the United States were scheduled, maintaining that its discussions concern a temporary transit arrangement with Oman.
What the week signals about the institutional balance is modest, and should be read that way. Pezeshkian won a snap election in July 2024 after Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash, and roughly two years of his term remain. His statement resolves nothing about whether he attempted to resign; it establishes that he intends to stay and that he will not concede a public rift. The more durable observation is structural: a president who must periodically deny that he has quit, a Leader whose office must periodically deny words attributed to him, and a security establishment that both of them describe as fully aligned with them. Each denial is plausible on its own. Together they describe a system in which the location of authority is contested enough that its participants have to keep saying it is not.
Why Iran’s Supreme Leader Has Not Been Seen or Heard in Five Months
Published August 4, 2026
Tehran has started offering a technical answer to an increasingly political question. On Sunday, August 2, Hamshahri — a daily newspaper affiliated with the Tehran municipality — published a short video on its website and Telegram channel explaining why no audio or video recording of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has been released since he took office. The argument was that advances in digital forensics, artificial intelligence and audio analysis mean a recording of a senior leader can give away his location and physical condition, and that his reliance on written statements reflects strict security precautions rather than an unwillingness to appear. Every audio file, the narrator says, carries hidden layers from which intelligence services can extract the physical, geographic, temporal, hardware and biological characteristics of the speaker.
The video organized the case around five axes. The first is room acoustics and geometry: every enclosed space has a unique acoustic signature, and by measuring how long sound energy takes to fall 60 decibels after the source stops, the approximate volume of the room can be estimated, with early reflections indicating the speaker’s distance from the walls and the ceiling height, and frequency absorption revealing whether the surfaces are carpet, concrete or glass. The second is electrical network frequency: grids run at 50 or 60 hertz but fluctuate slightly, and that faint electromagnetic hum is captured in the background of any recording, so services matching the fluctuations against national moment-by-moment databases can recover the exact date, the time, and even the specific section of the grid where the recording was made. The third is hardware fingerprinting — phone microphones filter out low frequencies and cheap components produce characteristic harmonic distortion, functioning like a device signature. The fourth is background noise: cooling systems, generators and filtration equipment identify a site indoors, while outdoors wind, traffic patterns, passing aircraft and even native insects and birds narrow the geography.
The fifth axis is the one that undercut the reassurance. The video says vocal-tract resonances, or formant frequencies, reveal the physical dimensions of the throat, mouth and nose, and that voice-conversion software offers no protection because the underlying filter can be recovered. It then adds that breathing patterns and the pauses between words indicate the speaker’s physical condition, heart rate and stress level. A brief meant to explain the silence ends by telling Iranians precisely which questions about the leader’s body a recording would answer.
The same video volunteered how the leader now communicates. Citing Mossad officers quoted in the Times, it says that if Mojtaba Khamenei is alive he is probably in an underground shelter beneath a mountain near Qom or Tehran, that he relays messages through multiple layers of couriers who do not know the full chain, and that Mossad’s effort is focused on identifying and analyzing those couriers. The only real route to him, the narrator concludes, would be recruiting an agent in contact with him — difficult given Iran’s security apparatus, since probably only two or three members of the IRGC know how to reach him. That is an unusual thing for a state-aligned outlet to broadcast as comfort.
The foreign minister has said the breach that made this necessary is human, and unresolved. In a wide-ranging appearance on the YouTube program Majaray-e Jang (Story of War) published in mid-July, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi discussed wartime security planning, succession preparations and negotiations with Washington, and said the security gaps that enabled attacks on senior officials and leadership sites probably have not been fully resolved. He said he was at Khamenei’s headquarters on February 28 when it was struck, and that the attack was carried out through a breach that still exists. Describing the accuracy of Israeli intelligence on the movements of Iran’s leadership — and the fact that the strike came at 9:30 in the morning — he said he no longer attributed it to technology or artificial factors, and that the security services were pursuing the possibility of human infiltration. He then went further than officials usually do: the breach, he said, is not limited to infiltration and obtaining information, and sometimes extends to influencing the direction of decision-making itself. In his phrasing, it also shapes the psychological environment.
Those remarks reframe the Hamshahri brief rather than confirming it. The newspaper treats the leader’s silence as a countermeasure against a technical threat — microphones, grid hum, room echo. The foreign minister describes a penetration deep enough to place officials at a specific address at a specific hour, still unfixed five months later, and possibly operating on Iranian decisions rather than merely observing them. If Araghchi is right, no amount of audio hygiene addresses the problem, and the leader’s invisibility looks less like a precaution than a necessity.
The interview also produced a security disclosure of its own. Describing how officials were protected during the fighting, Araghchi said none of them carried mobile phones, called his own situation exceptional, and noted that Iran has many protective tunnels. He said he attended two meetings in a tunnel, that he and his deputies never left the Foreign Ministry building during the war, and that for some hours of the day they simply circulated through the city by car because he could not put his phone aside. The host, the documentary filmmaker Javad Mogoei, then offered to be more specific: everyone knows about the tunnels, he said, and asked whether the audience wanted the locations as well — one at the end of Piruzi Street, the other in Darband, where commanders come and go frequently. Mogoei added that Iran’s adversaries already have information on the tunnels and have struck one of them.
That exchange, not the infiltration warning, drew the sharpest criticism. Raja News, the press organ of the hardline Paydari Front and close to supporters of the late president Ebrahim Raisi, asked in unusually blunt terms why a television host knows where commanders shelter. It argued that Araghchi’s disclosure was itself improper because it fills in the enemy’s target database, that the producers should have removed in the final edit, and that the host’s volunteering of a precise address was more questionable still — the enemy may have struck those tunnels on the basis of earlier information and then dropped them from its target list, without knowing that senior commanders are again using them heavily. Raising such security gaps while the country is fighting in the south, the outlet wrote, invites obvious questions. State-television analyst Mostafa Khoshcheshm separately said Araghchi had damaged his own standing with the interview.
The absence being explained is now roughly five months old. Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public since the February 28 strike that wounded him and killed his father, Ali Khamenei, along with his wife, Zahra Haddad-Adel, and other family members. He was named to succeed his father on March 8, and when Nowruz arrived on March 20, a speech attributed to him was read out on state television alongside a still photograph and an Iranian flag. Since then: written statements, but no image or voice.
The funeral was the moment many Iranians expected that to change, and it did not. The state staged a weeklong funeral procession for Ali Khamenei that drew hundreds of thousands of mourners across the country and ended with burial in Mashhad on July 9. His son and successor was absent throughout, including from the earlier funeral for his own wife; officials cited the continuing threat of assassination. Ali Khamenei’s other sons — Mostafa, Meysam and Masoud — attended, as did much of the political leadership and dozens of foreign delegations, which made the one absence more conspicuous. As the procession moved through Tehran on July 6, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said in a Hebrew-language statement that Ali Khamenei had been assassinated because he led the plan to destroy Israel, and warned that any Iranian leader reviving such plans would be stopped as well.
Questions about his physical condition have not been answered by any of this. People close to his inner circle told Reuters he sustained serious injuries, including damage to his face and significant harm to one or both legs. Asked in the July interview about his own contact with the new leader, Araghchi said he had never met him and had not seen him during this period, and that he did not think anyone beyond perhaps one or a few people had.
The likely near term is more of the same, with a narrowing margin. A technical brief explaining why the leader cannot be recorded, a foreign minister saying the breach that killed the last leader is still open and may be steering decisions, and an official account of a courier chain known to two or three people have all landed within a few weeks of each other. Together they describe a security problem the state does not claim to have solved. That is not evidence of incapacity and should not be treated as confirmation of it. But the explanation is now doing heavy work: five months on, the reasoning that made the silence understandable in March is being asked to carry a leadership that has been neither seen nor heard through a war, a succession, and his own father’s funeral — and it is being offered to a public, including much of the system’s own base, that expected the funeral to be the end of it.
Trump Calls Off Strikes as Iran and Oman Discuss Strait of Hormuz
Published August 3, 2026
President Trump called off what he described as the largest planned U.S. military operation since World War II, announcing Saturday that strikes on Iran were canceled on condition of a rapid deal. In a Saturday night Truth Social post, Trump wrote that the U.S. was “locked and loaded” against Iran at levels of military power not seen since World War II, but that Iran and other Middle Eastern countries had asked him to hold off because the “perimeters” of a deal had been agreed. He said the framework included the immediate, complete, and total opening of the Strait of Hormuz and an end to what he called Iran’s nuclear threat, and that Israel had joined the commitment to refrain from attacking. According to U.S. officials cited in American press reports, the Navy had already adjusted its air operations for the planned day of strikes and prepared munitions for the attack.
The reversal followed direct appeals from Gulf capitals, chiefly Riyadh. Axios reporter Barak Ravid, citing two U.S. officials and a source familiar with the call, reported that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman raised concerns about the planned strikes in a Saturday phone call with Trump, asked for details of the operational plan and urged him to de-escalate. President Trump had been seriously weighing strikes on Iran’s energy facilities, with reports of an imminent escalation leaking over the weekend. Saudi Arabia’s state news agency SPA confirmed the call, saying the crown prince stressed prioritizing dialogue to reduce escalation and achieving calm that paves the way for diplomatic solutions.
Axios added that Qatar, the UAE, Turkey, and Pakistan were also working to lower tensions, and that Qatari mediators spoke separately Saturday with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff, and Omani officials about a Hormuz reopening deal. Israel’s Channel 12, citing senior U.S. officials, reported that CENTCOM had prepared strikes on Iranian energy and infrastructure targets with Israeli participation expected, that Qatar asked Trump for another 24 hours, and that negotiators were close to an arrangement including a renewed ceasefire, a toll-free opening of the strait for 60 days, new shipping routes, and resumed U.S.-Iran talks based on the June 17 memorandum of understanding. Neither government has confirmed these reported terms.
On Sunday, Trump said negotiations with Iran would begin Monday afternoon and repeatedly called a deal imminent. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, he said the U.S. had been prepared to launch the attack Sunday before Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Iran urged him to hold off, saying “we were all set to go” and that it would have been a massive attack. “The deal is imminent, having to do with the Hormuz Strait and also, ultimately, the denuclearization of Iran,” he said. Asked about resuming strikes, he said the U.S. was ready to go at any time but that he was not looking to kill people, and that Gulf leaders preferred a deal to a refugee crisis spilling across their borders. Oil markets moved on the announcement: Brent crude fell $4.08, or about 4.6 percent, to $83.85 a barrel late Sunday, with WTI down $4.01 at $80.66, per Reuters.
Iranian outlets denied nearly every element of the American account. The semi-official Mehr news agency rejected Trump’s claim that Tehran had asked the U.S. to refrain from attacking, and Iranian semi-official media denied reports that Iran had agreed to a deal dividing control of the Strait of Hormuz. The state news agency IRNA reported that Araghchi spent Saturday on the phone with senior officials in Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia – including Field Marshal Asim Munir and Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan – warning against any adventurous action by the U.S. military and emphasizing Iran’s full readiness to safeguard its sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national security.
On Monday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told his weekly press conference in Tehran that no negotiations between Iran and the United States are under way: “We are not going to host a delegation or be guests of a country during these days.” However, the denial does not appear to extend to indirect talks through mediators, which appear to be ongoing.
Trump answered Iran’s denial Monday morning with a post accusing Iran’s leadership of lying about the nature of negotiations. “Iranian Leadership is unbelievably duplicitous!” he wrote on Truth Social, saying Tehran asked for meetings – “some would say ‘beg'” – with talks beginning and more scheduled. He dismissed Iran’s statements that it would operate the strait powerfully, claiming that the waterway is already completely controlled by the U.S. Navy and its blockade, which he called “The United States Wall of Steel,” and that nothing would get through to Iran unless a deal or total surrender was accomplished, ending with the declaration that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a Fox News interview, said “regime change” in Iran need not mean full overthrow but a change in the regime’s nature and behavior, achieved by imposing costs it can no longer pay. He added that unlike a nuclear agreement, which can be signed and verified, forcing a government to abandon its regional strategy is a continuing process, and pressure toward it would have no defined endpoint.
The negotiation that does exist, by Tehran’s account, is between Iran and Oman, over a new transit corridor through the Strait of Hormuz. Araghchi told Monday’s cabinet session, per Iranian state media, that the talks are on a path to being finalized and are in their final stages. Baghaei said the discussions, running for the past seven to eight days, aim to agree on a specific corridor for transit between the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman. He indicated the route would be temporary and meant to provide safe navigation “in consultation and cooperation with Oman.” He said the agreed path would be neither the current northern route nor the existing Oman-approved southern route, which he said had made the region insecure and harmed Iran’s national interests, but a new route both sides settle on.
Araghchi asserted that the strait was closed by American treaty violations and the U.S. blockade, not by any dispute with Muscat, and that an Iran-Oman understanding is therefore a necessary but not sufficient condition for reopening the waterway. Israel’s Channel 12, citing two informed diplomats, reported the corridor under discussion would have ships enter the strait from the Iranian-controlled side and exit on the Omani side, and that Araghchi’s reported assent to a reopening deal was what prompted Trump’s decision to cancel the attack. Al Mayadeen, the Lebanese network close to Iran, cited an unnamed Iranian source said Washington had offered concessions on the southern route, which Tehran rejected while telling the U.S. the strait would not open until the war fully ends. None of these accounts has been independently verified.
Mediation channels multiplied through the weekend. Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar invited Araghchi to visit Islamabad at the earliest opportunity in a Monday phone call, according to a Pakistani Foreign Ministry statement that said the two discussed regional and international developments. Araghchi is currently in Najaf, Iraq, and Pakistan has been the principal mediator between Tehran and Washington.
President Masoud Pezeshkian, meanwhile, posted on X that the Islamabad MoU was the product of the collective wisdom of the Supreme National Security Council, that all its members are aligned behind it, and that the agreement “will be the center of gravity of our foreign relations” going forward, adding that the security of Iran, the region, and Iran’s allies would be enhanced by it. The statement serves as a call to compel American adherence to the framework rather than abandon it.
Hardline institutions in Tehran warned against the diplomatic track in unusually severe terms. The presidium of the Assembly of Experts issued a statement, carried by Iranian media, cautioning against any simplistic thinking at this sensitive juncture, saying the recent attacks and repeated violations of the MoU proved the American president’s signature invalid and that trust in this government is nothing but a mirage. The statement declared that whispers of capitulation by plotters acting in the name of defending peace constitute an unforgivable treason, that confronting such actions legally is the clear duty of relevant officials, and that all steps must remain within the views, directives, and judgments of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. The same presidium declared Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “mahdoor al-dam” – deserving of death – in early July, a statement the Assembly’s own secretariat described the next day as unusual and unconventional and in need of further review.
Acting Defense Minister Majid Ebn-Reza wrote on X that even if the enemy’s recent statements are made as psychological operations and a war of calculations, Iran regards every threat as a real and serious one, and would be neither surprised nor passive, treating threats as grounds to raise readiness and strengthen deterrence.
Military signaling continued through the pause on both sides. The IRGC announced, in a statement carried by the Tasnim news agency, that it had shot down a U.S. MQ-9 drone over the Strait of Hormuz with fire from a new advanced Aerospace Force air-defense system; the statement gave no date or time, and CENTCOM has neither confirmed nor denied the claim. On Sunday, the UK Maritime Trade Operations agency reported that a tanker’s master heard an explosion in close proximity to the vessel 20 nautical miles northeast of Khasab, Oman; the ship and crew were safe and authorities were investigating.
Separately, CNN reported that an officer in CENTCOM’s intelligence branch emailed a broad group of military analysts last Wednesday soliciting “new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” an approach military officials described as unusual. However, Capt. Timothy Hawkins responded that the command has a long history of innovative thinking and that Adm. Brad Cooper seeks input from personnel regardless of rank. The same reporting said U.S. intelligence assessments have concluded the bombing campaign alone is unlikely to change Iran’s negotiating position, and that CENTCOM has developed – though Trump has not approved – a plan for one to two weeks of heavy bombardment aimed at Iran’s remaining missile capabilities. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted Monday that the U.S. remains “locked and loaded” and ready to strike at levels not seen since World War II.
An adviser to Iran’s army command disclosed ground campaigns inside Iraqi Kurdistan. Brig. Gen. Mojtaba Jafari, adviser to the commander-in-chief of the regular army, said at a ceremony Monday, in remarks carried by Iranian media, that commandos of the 23rd NOHED Brigade – the Army Ground Force’s airborne special forces – have carried out 14 ground operations in Sulaymaniyah and Erbil against what he called counter-revolutionaries, destroying and capturing their personnel and returning without losses. Al Mayadeen reported that the operations included the killing of Soran Mohammadzadeh, whom it described as an intelligence commander in the Kurdish opposition, along with strikes on intelligence figures of separatist groups and several Iraqis.
The Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) said in a July 3 statement that Mohammadzadeh, a member of its general organization, was assassinated in an Erbil hotel on the evening of June 26 by a team of IRGC intelligence operatives using local collaborators, that he was buried a week later, and that the party withheld details at the time to deny the Islamic Republic an intelligence advantage. These accounts come from parties to the conflict and have not been independently confirmed, but they point to a ground dimension of the war inside Iraqi Kurdistan larger than previously acknowledged.
Shipping data showed traffic through the strait still falling as negotiations have continued. Maritime tracker Kpler recorded 51 vessel transits through Hormuz from July 30 to August 2, down about 28 percent from 71 in the preceding four days. Most of the vessels – 30 were headed toward Iran, and a substantial share involved sanctioned tonnage, including 10 ships under U.S. sanctions and 10 counted in the Russia-Iran “shadow fleet.” AIS data from MarineTraffic and LSEG showed six Saudi-flagged supertankers, returning empty from Asian destinations, diverting toward southern Africa rather than transiting the Bab al-Mandeb Strait after Houthi threats against Saudi shipping.
The maritime intelligence firm Windward reported an apparent Chinese exception at both chokepoints: 22 China-linked vessels passed Bab al-Mandeb and berthed at Saudi ports between July 20 and August 2 without a single incident, even as the Houthis attacked four Saudi tankers in the same window, while a Hong Kong-flagged very large crude carrier exited Hormuz on July 30-31 broadcasting “Chinese crew/owner” in its AIS destination field, having loaded roughly 2.14 million barrels at Iraq’s Basra terminal for Singapore. CENTCOM, for its part, said it has redirected 35 commercial vessels and disabled two others since restarting its blockade of Iranian ports – figures that, like the IRGC’s tanker-strike claims, come from a party to the conflict.
The weekend’s sequence follows a pattern the war has produced before. A threatened escalation, a pause announced from Washington, contested claims about what was agreed, and then recriminations within a day. The June 17 MoU and the early-July truce each traveled a similar arc before collapsing within weeks. The likely near-term outcome, if the Oman channel holds, is a narrow and explicitly temporary transit corridor rather than a settlement. Baghaei’s own framing sets that ceiling: even a finalized Iran-Oman understanding is a necessary but not sufficient condition for reopening the strait, with the broader questions on the blockade, the nuclear file and the collapsed MoU potentially deferred to talks that Tehran currently denies are happening. Whether Monday’s exchange of accusations derails the corridor talks themselves should be clearer within days.
The cost of another failed off-ramp would fall, as before, on people with no say in it. The crews navigating two contested straits, the families in southern Iran’s coastal cities who have absorbed the heaviest recent strikes, and the millions already displaced are living with decisions made in Washington, Tehran, and the Gulf capitals. By OCHA and UNHCR counts from the war’s first phase alone, as many as 2,362 civilians were killed and 3.2 million people displaced. Similarly, 18 U.S. service members have been killed in action since February with many hundreds more injured. A corridor through the Strait of Hormuz may not end the war, but it would be a key step away from it that could build toward greater progress.