Iran launches wave of executions with world fixated on Gaza

Demonstrators pay tribute to Mahsa Amini, one year after she was killed on Sept 16 – Probal Rashid/LightRocket

Iran has launched a spree of executions targeting activists and ethnic minorities since the war in Gaza broke out, rights groups and campaigners say.

With the world’s attention diverted by the Israel-Hamas war, Iran has executed at least 229 people, they said, as the regime in Tehran clamps down in the wake of the uprising after the death of Mahsa Amini.

Iran on Saturday said it had executed a man who was sentenced to death after being convicted of working with Israel’s intelligence services.

It did not identify the man but said he was found guilty of “collecting and providing classified information to the Mossad spy service with the aim of disrupting public order”.

In November, the UN warned Iran was carrying out executions “at an alarming rate,” putting to death at least 419 people in the first seven months of the year, a 30 per cent increase from the same period in 2022.

Since Oct 7, Kurdish and Baluchi minorities have been among the major victims of the killing spree, with at least a quarter of the victims coming from the Baluchi minority.

Among the executions there are also two women and one child, killed in November.

Shahin Gobadi, spokesman for opposition group the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (MEK), said many of its members have been victims.

The clerical regime is engaged in a war with the people of Iran to prevent another uprising inside Iran, he said, referring to the worst civil unrest in the regime’s history, which began in September 2022 after Amini’s death in the custody of Tehran’s morality police.

The death of the 22-year-old, who had been arrested for not wearing her hijab properly, was followed by a tightening of rules by security forces with more than 500 civilians killed.

Thousands more were arrested arbitrarily and, according to Iranian activists, it spurned a wave of state-sponsored sexual violence against women violating hijab laws in and out of Iran’s jails.

‘Secret killing of political prisoners’

“The mullahs want to prevent the resurgence of the uprising with a wave of executions, including the secret killing of political prisoners, and by intensifying repression, especially against the activists of the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (MEK) and the Resistance Units affiliated to the MEK,” Mr Gobadi added.

He said the executions are going unseen under the shadows of a conflict in which Iran’s proxies in the likes of Yemen, Lebanon and Syria are joining the war on Israel alongside Iran-backed terror group Hamas which invaded the Jewish state on Oct 7, killing at least 1,200 and taking over 240 more hostages.

“It is time for the UK, the EU, its member states and the US to take practical steps instead of simply verbally condemning the gross violation of human rights in Iran,” he said, calling for the proscription of Iran’s military body, the Revolutionary Guards.

“The first practical step is to proscribe the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), the main apparatus of repression and war-mongering, as a terrorist entity, a step that is long overdue.”

According to a report in November by Norway-based Iran Human Rights, 604 people have been executed in the first ten months of the year, the highest number in eight years, including mass executions.

In 2022, the rights group recorded 582 executions, with the highest recent records being 972 in 2015.

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