Hangman’s Rope Tightens

Taking advantage of the world’s focus on the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices, and possible negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, the Tehran regime is denying medical care to a gravely ill Nobel Peace Prize laureate and ramping up executions.

Read more below.

Share your thoughts, analysis and predictions with me at ailves@mbn-news.com. If you were forwarded the MBN Iran Briefing, please subscribe. Read me in Arabic here, or on the flagship MBN Arabic-language and English-language news sites.

And don’t forget to check out the latest Iran Briefing podcast. In this edition, MBN China expert Min Mitchell joins Matthew Kaminski and yours truly in unpacking next week’s U.S.-China summit, its connection to the Iran war, and how the world’s superpowers are gaining and losing from the conflict.

Watch here or listen here.

 

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

 

“Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Narges Mohammadi is imprisoned solely for her peaceful human rights work. Her life is now in the hands of the Iranian authorities.”

—Jørgen Watne Frydnes, Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee

 

TOP OF THE NEWS

Six men were hanged last weekend. Several had been labeled Mossad agents. Most had confessed under torture. Their families were not told in advance of the executions. In the same period, Narges Mohammadi was transferred from prison to a cardiac care unit, where a Tehran prosecutor is overruling the doctors who say she needs specialist care. The Islamic Republic’s judicial system remains what it was.

An empty space showing that Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi was not present during the award ceremony in Oslo, Dec. 2023. Photo: Reuters.

Narges Mohammadi currently hovers between life and death in a cardiac care unit at a hospital in Zanjan, northwestern Iran, where she was transferred on Saturday following two episodes of complete loss of consciousness and a severe cardiac crisis in prison. Her husband said yesterday that she is in danger of dying from her cardiac conditions. Her blood pressure continues to fluctuate dangerously, and treatment has been limited to oxygen therapy. Two cardiologists who examined her in Zanjan have said she cannot be treated there and must be transferred to Pars Hospital in Tehran. The Tehran deputy prosecutor has overruled them, claiming that the advanced state of medicine in the Islamic Republic makes transferring her unnecessary.

Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 for her decades of work for women’s rights, against the death penalty, and against the systematic use of torture and sexualized violence against political prisoners in Iranian jails, a fight that by the time of the award had already cost her 13 arrests, five convictions, 31 years in cumulative sentences, and 154 lashes.

From inside Evin Prison during the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, she organized solidarity actions among fellow inmates, wrote prolifically about human rights in Iran, and smuggled out an article to the New York Times on the one-year anniversary of Mahsa Jina Amini’s killing.

Mohammadi has been held at Zanjan Central Prison since her re-arrest in December, when security forces violently detained her at the seventh-day memorial ceremony for human rights lawyer Khosrow Alikordi in Mashhad, beating her with batons and using tear gas on the crowd, which I wrote about in this newsletter at the time. She had been on medical furlough from an earlier sentence of 13 years and nine months and, as I reported, had an additional sentence tacked on in February, increasing her lifetime total of sentences to 44 years. The Nobel Committee called for her immediate release.

Her current health crisis has been building since Mar. 24, when fellow inmates found her unconscious in her cell. Prison doctors gave medication but refused a hospital transfer despite clear signs of a cardiac event, and when lawyers visited days later, she was in a very bad state. She reported debilitating headaches, nausea, double vision, and chest pain. Amnesty International has weighed in, citing “the deliberate denial of timely and adequate specialized healthcare.”

Executed: Nasser Bakerzadeh. Photo: Kurdistan Human Rights Network.

The executions continue in Iran. On Friday, two men were executed at Urmia Central Prison on espionage charges. Nasser Bakerzadeh, a 26-year-old Kurdish man from Urmia, was convicted of “corruption on earth,” a Quranic charge carrying a mandatory death sentence under Iranian law. Yaghoub Karimpour, a 43-year-old ethnic Azerbaijani law graduate who suffered from physical disabilities and had been arrested during the June 2025 Israeli strikes, was convicted of intelligence cooperation with Israel. In the words of the judiciary’s official news agency, the two were “members of the Zionist regime’s spy network.”

Bakerzadeh had first been arrested in August 2023 and re-arrested in Jan. 2024. The Supreme Court had twice previously overturned his death sentence before confirming it on a third attempt.

Executed: Yaghoub Karimpour. Photo: Iran Human Rights.

Most likely executed the same morning (although the event was officially announced a day later), was Mehrab Abdollahzadeh, 28, a Kurdish man arrested during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests, hanged without his family or lawyers being notified in advance.

Executed: Mehrab Abdollahzadeh. Photo: Kurdistan Human Rights.

Then on May 3, families of three men arrested during the Jan. 2026 uprising in Mashhad were informed their sons had been hanged. No warning, no final visit. Their bodies were delivered to a cemetery at 10 AM. Mehdi Rasouli, 25, a laborer, and Mohammadreza Miri, 21, also a laborer, had been officially designated “Mossad elements” in the Mizan news agency report on the executions. Ebrahim Dowlatabadi, a father of two children aged nine and fourteen, was described as a “main instigator” of unrest, which the site referred to as “the Israeli coup of January 8 and 9,” in Mashhad’s Tabarsi district. Before his execution, Rasouli had told relatives he had confessed to the charges only after severe beatings and torture; his lawyers confirmed that confessions extracted under torture formed the primary evidence in all three cases. Six executions across two days.

Executed: Mehdi Rasouli, Ebrahim Dowlatabadi, Mohammadreza Miri. Photo: Iran Human Rights Monitor.

The Mossad label is applied without evidence to people whose documented acts range from throwing stones at a security forces minibus (in the case of Sasan Azadvar, 21, a karate champion executed in Isfahan days before) to nuclear sector employees and Kurdish activists detained years before the war began. According to the text of a law that entered into force in Oct. 2025, “any intelligence or espionage activity” for Israel or other entities hostile to Iran “shall be punishable by confiscation of all assets… and by the death penalty.”

Executed: Sasan Azadvar. Photo: Iran Human Rights.

The regime’s modus operandi is to pressure families to stay silent and tell them their relative’s case is under Pardons Commission review, and then inform them of the execution after the fact. Iran Human Rights director Mahmoud Amiry-Moghaddam said the pace of political executions was “unprecedented in the past thirty years.” Rights groups warn that proceedings are reliant on forced confessions, with no access to independent counsel.

Iran Human Rights and French anti-death-penalty group ECPM recorded at least 1,639 executions in Iran during all of 2025, a 68 percent increase on 2024 and the highest total since 1989. (See my report in my year-in-review edition of this newsletter.) The UN said last week that since the current war began on Feb. 28, at least 21 people had been executed on national security charges in Iran and over 4,000 arrested. Iran Human Rights Monitor counts 26 political executions, a broader category, since Mar. 19 alone. Rights groups warn the true total across all charge categories is almost certainly higher, given that the near-total internet blackout limits independent verification.

These are the consequences of the protests that were triggered by the collapse of the rial and rising inflation in a bazaar strike in Tehran at the end of December. By Jan. 8, when authorities imposed a total internet blackout, security forces had escalated to slaughtering thousands of civilians with live fire, with mass unlawful killings on an unprecedented scale.

The train from January arrests and mass slaughter to May executions is now running at full steam. Judiciary chief Mohseni-Ejei has previously publicly ordered the acceleration of death sentences. The Friday Prayer leader of Sari complained to his congregation on Friday that arresting people “in groups of ten and fifty” while processing their cases individually – “drip-fed” trials, as he termed it – doesn’t yield results, in an apparent call for mass trials and accelerated executions rather than case-by-case judicial proceedings.

Deliberately withheld medical care and an accelerating execution schedule are not separate phenomena. They are cruelty as policy.

Tehran Prosecutor General Saeed Mortazavi adjusts his hair as he attends an execution by hanging in Tehran in 2007. Photo: Reuters.

ESSENTIAL READING: IRAN EXECUTIONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Iran’s Execution Machine: Political Hangings Surge as Dozens Face Imminent Death – Center for Human Rights in Iran, April 2026. Comprehensive recent documentation of the political execution campaign: secret proceedings, families not notified, confessions extracted under torture, lawyers prosecuted for speaking publicly about their clients’ cases.

Iran: Human Rights Situation Spirals Deeper into Crisis – Human Rights Watch, February 2026. Annual World Report chapter on Iran: executions at their highest scale since the late 1980s, mass killings of protesters, and the January uprising crackdown.

“Iran Secretly Executes Two Men Accused of Espionage in Orumiyeh” – Kurdistan Human Rights Network, May 2026. Includes the Supreme Court’s reasoning when it twice overturned Bakerzadeh’s sentence and the detail that Karimpour’s case had not yet been assigned to a Supreme Court branch when he was hanged.

Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran 2025 – Iran Human Rights / ECPM, April 2026. The primary statistical reference, covering charge breakdowns by category, ethnic and geographic distribution, and the legal architecture enabling the surge.

Ali Ardestani: First Person Hanged for Israel Espionage in 2026 – Iran Human Rights, January 2026. Contains the clearest available English-language summary of the October 2025 espionage law, formally entitled the “Law on Intensifying the Punishment for Espionage and Cooperation with the Zionist Regime and Hostile States against National Security and Interests,” including its expansion of capital offenses and lowered threshold for the death penalty.