Iran Steps up Internet Crackdown One Year After Mahsa Amini Death 

A woman speaks on a cell phone while a man next to her browses a phone along a street in Tehran on September 4, 2023. (AFP)
A woman speaks on a cell phone while a man next to her browses a phone along a street in Tehran on September 4, 2023. (AFP)
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Iran Steps up Internet Crackdown One Year After Mahsa Amini Death 

A woman speaks on a cell phone while a man next to her browses a phone along a street in Tehran on September 4, 2023. (AFP)
A woman speaks on a cell phone while a man next to her browses a phone along a street in Tehran on September 4, 2023. (AFP)

One year after young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini died in police custody while under arrest for improper hijab, Iran has stepped up internet restrictions to stop a resurgence of the widespread mass protests that swept the country last year.

Ahead of the Sept. 16 anniversary of Amini's death, days before her 22nd birthday, government opponents say Iran is conducting a wide-ranging crackdown to stifle possible dissent.

At least 22,000 were arrested in the protests and seven people executed. The demonstrations - the biggest and most widespread since the 1979 revolution - were sparked after images spread on social media of Amini lying unconscious in a hospital bed following her arrest.

Now Iran is doing everything it can to prevent the same thing happening again, rights groups and activists say.

As well as blocking thousands of websites, Iran regularly shuts down the internet altogether, or imposes "digital curfews" - stopping access in the evening when protests are more likely. It also blocks messaging apps and has criminalized virtual private networks (VPNs) used to get around the curbs.

Iran ranked third globally in the number of times it shut down the internet last year, according to digital rights group Access Now.

This included shutting down mobile networks, both nationally and in targeted areas, while also blocking access to Instagram and WhatsApp, the only two major platforms not already subject to outright bans, Access Now said.

"Internet shutdowns violate human rights," said Access Now policy and advocacy manager Marwa Fatafta. "They are a disproportionate and a draconian attack on human rights, implemented by governments in order to keep people in the dark, stop information flows, hide atrocities and human rights abuses, and consequently shield authorities from accountability."

Minorities targeted

Internet access has never been as bad in Iran, said Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights and security at Miaan, a Texas-based group that advocates for human rights in Iran.

That is true especially, he said, in regions where most belong to one of Iran's ethnic and religious minorities, which saw some of the most virulent protests and violent crackdowns.

These include Kurdistan in the west, where Amini lived and was buried, Khuzestan in the southwest, home to many Iranian Arabs, and the province of Sistan and Baluchistan in the southeast, where many belong to the Baluch ethnic minority.

Rights groups say police fired from rooftops near the main mosque in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan and Baluchistan, and killed up to 96 people as they protested after Friday prayers on Sept. 30 last year. But weekly protests have continued.

"Authorities have been shutting down the internet every week during Friday prayers in Sistan and Baluchistan and its capital Zahedan at a specific time for a year," Rashidi told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Internet shutdowns have economic costs

Already struggling with international sanctions, high inflation and unemployment, internet shutdowns cost Iran an additional $773 million last year, digital privacy research group TOP10VPN estimated.

The impact is felt by small businesses across the country.

"We haven't had one day without the internet causing some sort of problem. It's impossible to have a normal life in these conditions," said Saeed Souzangar, who said he was struggling to keep his Tehran technology company afloat.

"I had to sell my house and my car just to keep the office lights on," he said.

VPNs are vital for Iranians to connect to social media and communications apps. A member of parliament said last month that around 80% of Iranians used VPNs to bypass censorship.

A 30-year-old web designer in Tehran said not having access to VPNs would have serious financial consequences. Without them, she is unable to work or study, she said.

"It would mean more isolation, more living in darkness," said the woman, who declined to be named.

'Militarizing the internet'

Despite the cost, Iranian authorities have called for yet tougher measures. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has the final word on all matters in Iran, in June called for the judiciary to crack down harder on online dissent.

Meanwhile, Communications Minister Issa Zarepour last month said the country had "twice" the internet access it needed. The ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Iran's hardline government introduced a bill to parliament in 2021 that would effectively hand over control of the internet to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which reports directly to the supreme leader, and criminalize the use of VPNs.

Facing opposition from some within parliament and a public backlash, the User Protection Bill has languished in the assembly, but opposition groups say hardliners have bypassed parliament and brought in most elements of the bill anyway.

An as-yet unpublished report by Miaan said the IRGC was seeking to gain absolute control over the internet in Iran.

"Infractions will be dealt with by the military and the internet will become untouchable," Rashidi said.

Internet freedom community

Despite the risks, some in Iran have tried to fight back. Rashidi said the internet crackdown had given rise to a digital rights community including tech specialists, journalists, lawyers and civil society members seeking to limit the changes.

"It's a real thing and they are doing real work," he said.

The internet freedom community is viewed as a threat by Iranian authorities as it endangered state control of what information is consumed by the public, said Simin Kargar, a fellow at Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.

"We have had tech activists go to jail for teaching people about circumvention tools and privacy preservation online," Kargar said from Washington.

Security forces arrested prominent digital rights advocate Amir Mirmirani, better known by his online name Jadi, and several others in October for protesting internet shutdowns. Jadi said in February he had been released from prison.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation spoke to several activists inside Iran who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisals.

They said authorities had been shutting down the internet and employing filters and surveillance, as well as slowing down internet speeds to suppress opposition narratives on social media and messaging applications.

But Iranian internet freedom activists have nevertheless gathered signatures for online petitions inside Iran to stop the Internet User Protection bill officially passing through parliament.

"I'm not optimistic that the government will loosen its internet restrictions, but if we don't fight, if we don't try, things will get even worse," said one activist.

"Even though the bill is being implemented for all intents and purposes, at least the one million signatures the petition gathered show the world that Iranians are vehemently against it," Rashidi said.

Another activist in Iran campaigning against restrictions said policies restricting internet access were to be expected given the country’s human rights record, but said it was disappointing the outside world did not seem to care.

"I wish someone out there would hear our voice and do something," said the source.



What to Expect, and What Not to, at the UN Meeting on an Israel-Palestinian Two-state Solution

27 July 2025, Palestinian Territories, Gaza City: Palestinians carry sacks of flour from a humanitarian aid convoy, as they make their way along al-Rashid street. Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images via ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
27 July 2025, Palestinian Territories, Gaza City: Palestinians carry sacks of flour from a humanitarian aid convoy, as they make their way along al-Rashid street. Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images via ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
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What to Expect, and What Not to, at the UN Meeting on an Israel-Palestinian Two-state Solution

27 July 2025, Palestinian Territories, Gaza City: Palestinians carry sacks of flour from a humanitarian aid convoy, as they make their way along al-Rashid street. Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images via ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
27 July 2025, Palestinian Territories, Gaza City: Palestinians carry sacks of flour from a humanitarian aid convoy, as they make their way along al-Rashid street. Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images via ZUMA Press Wire/dpa

The UN General Assembly is bringing high-level officials together this week to promote a two-state solution to the decades-old Israel-Palestinian conflict that would place their peoples side by side, living in peace in independent nations.

Israel and its close ally the United States are boycotting the two-day meeting, which starts Monday and will be co-chaired by the foreign ministers of France and Saudi Arabia. Israel’s right-wing government opposes a two-state solution, and the United States has called the meeting “counterproductive” to its efforts to end the war in Gaza. France and Saudi Arabia want the meeting to put a spotlight on the two-state solution, which they view as the only viable road map to peace, and to start addressing the steps to get there.

The meeting was postponed from late June and downgraded from a four-day meeting of world leaders amid surging tensions in the Middle East, including Israel's 12-day war against Iran and the war in Gaza.

“It was absolutely necessary to restart a political process, the two-state solution process, that is today threatened, more threatened than it has ever been," French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said Sunday on CBS News' “Face the Nation."

Here's what's useful to know about the upcoming gathering.

Why a two-state solution? The idea of dividing the Holy Land goes back decades.

When the British mandate over Palestine ended, the UN partition plan in 1947 envisioned dividing the territory into Jewish and Arab states. Israel accepted the plan, but upon Israel's declaration of independence the following year, its Arab neighbors declared war and the plan was never implemented. Under a 1949 armistice, Jordan held control over the West Bank and east Jerusalem and Egypt over Gaza.

Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those lands for a future independent state alongside Israel, and this idea of a two-state solution based on Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries has been the basis of peace talks dating back to the 1990s.

The two-state solution has wide international support. The logic behind it is that the population of Israel — along with east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza — is divided equally between Jews and Palestinians.

The establishment of an independent Palestine would leave Israel as a democratic country with a solid Jewish majority and grant the Palestinians their dream of self-determination.

Why hold a conference now? France and Saudi Arabia have said they want to put a spotlight on the two-state solution as the only viable path to peace in the Middle East — and they want to see a road map with specific steps, first ending the war in Gaza.

The co-chairs said in a document sent to UN members in May that the primary goal of the meeting is to identify actions by “all relevant actors” to implement the two-state solution — and “to urgently mobilize the necessary efforts and resources to achieve this aim, through concrete and time-bound commitments.”

Saudi diplomat Manal Radwan, who led the country’s delegation to the preparatory conference, said the meeting must “chart a course for action, not reflection.” It must be “anchored in a credible and irreversible political plan that addresses the root cause of the conflict and offers a real path to peace, dignity and mutual security,” she said.

French President Emmanuel Macron has pushed for a broader movement toward a two-state solution in parallel with a recognition of Israel’s right to defend itself. He announced late Thursday that France will recognize the state of Palestine officially at the annual gathering of world leaders at the UN General Assembly in late September.

About 145 countries have recognized the state of Palestine. But Macron’s announcement, ahead of Monday’s meeting and amid increasing global anger over desperately hungry people in Gaza starting to die from starvation, makes France the most important Western power to do so.

What is Israel’s view? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects the two-state solution on both nationalistic and security grounds.

Netanyahu’s religious and nationalist base views the West Bank as the biblical and historical homeland of the Jewish people, while Israeli Jews overwhelmingly consider Jerusalem their eternal capital. The city’s eastern side is home to Judaism’s holiest site, along with major Christian and Muslim holy places.

Hard-line Israelis like Netanyahu believe the Palestinians don’t want peace, citing the second Palestinian uprising of the early 2000s, and more recently the Hamas takeover of Gaza two years after Israel withdrew from the territory in 2005. The Hamas takeover led to five wars, including the current and ongoing 21-month conflict.

At the same time, Israel also opposes a one-state solution in which Jews could lose their majority. Netanyahu's preference seems to be the status quo, where Israel maintains overall control and Israelis have fuller rights than Palestinians, Israel deepens its control by expanding settlements, and the Palestinian Authority has limited autonomy in pockets of the West Bank.

Netanyahu condemned Macron’s announcement of Palestinian recognition, saying it “rewards terror and risks creating another Iranian proxy, just as Gaza became."

What is the Palestinian view? The Palestinians, who label the current arrangement “apartheid,” accuse Israel of undermining repeated peace initiatives by deepening settlement construction in the West Bank and threatening annexation. That would harm the prospect of a contiguous Palestinian state and their prospects for independence.

Ahmed Majdalani, a member of the PLO Executive Committee and close associate of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said the meeting will serve as preparation for a presidential summit expected in September. It will take place either in France or at the UN on the sidelines of the high-level meeting, UN diplomats said.

Majdalani said the Palestinians have several goals, first a “serious international political process leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

The Palestinians also want additional international recognition of their state by major countries including Britain. But expect that to happen in September, not at Monday’s meeting, Majdalani said. And he said they want economic and financial support for the Palestinian Authority and international support for the reconstruction and recovery of the Gaza Strip.

What will happen — and won't happen — at the meeting? All 193 UN member nations have been invited to attend the meeting and a French diplomat said about 40 ministers are expected. The United States and Israel are the only countries who are boycotting.

The co-chairs have circulated an outcome document which could be adopted, and there could be some announcements of intentions to recognize a Palestinian state. But with Israel and the United States boycotting, there is no prospect of a breakthrough and the resumption of long-stalled negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on an end to their conflict.

Secretary-General António Guterres urged participants after the meeting was announced “to keep the two-state solution alive.” And he said the international community must not only support a solution where independent states of Palestine and Israel live side-by-side in peace but “materialize the conditions to make it happen.”