Iran Back Online

Welcome back to the MBN Iran Briefing.

Today, the war reached its three-month mark. The Abraham Accords have reemerged as a topic, the Islamic Republic’s internet blackout appears to be letting up, and the regime executed yet another protester.

Find out more below.

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And don’t forget to check out the latest Iran Briefing podcast. In this edition I’m joined by MBN’s own Yehia Qasim from Israel and MBN China Editor Min Mitchell as we look at the Trump and Putin visits to Beijing and at a groundbreaking story by our chief correspondent in Jerusalem.

Watch here or listen here. And watch for another Iran Briefing podcast in the coming days, featuring MBN Washington, DC bureau chief Joe Kawly, Mohammed Soliman of the Middle East Institute, and yours truly.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Negotiations between America and Iran are always zero-trust and zero-sum.”

— Karim Sadjadpour, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

TOP OF THE NEWS

Internet Blackout, Epilogue

Iran’s 88-day internet blackout began to crack on Tuesday. Internet monitoring group Netblocks posted on X that the Iranians’ access to the internet has been in a “state of restoration” but cautions that the access is still “heavily filtered, with new restrictions on messaging and app stores compared to pre-January.”

Telecom companies began restoring international connectivity after a vote by the government’s newly-formed Special Task Force for the Regulation and Governance of Cyberspace, chaired by First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref. The task force had voted to restore access to the conditions that prevailed before Jan. 2026.

Aref announced the move himself, writing on X that “the first step toward free and regulated access to cyberspace has been taken,” adding that “smart services will be streamlined, the demands of the people who have thus stood by the system and Iran will be fulfilled.” Minister of Communications and Information Technology Sattar Hashemi described the decision as not just a technical fix but a “return of stability and trust.”

Men in Tehran using their phones yesterday after reported restoration of international internet access. Photo: Reuters

The restoration followed weeks of domestic political pressure documented in Iranian reform-leaning media. Reformist site Etemad, citing officials familiar with the task force’s work, had reported that the blackout was costing the economy heavily and that hardline factions resisting restoration were being overruled. Business and economics site Eqtesad Online had previously noted that the task force’s stated mission was to lift the blackout by the middle of the current Iranian month of Khordad at the latest, which proved accurate.

The restoration is not without complication, as the judiciary immediately moved to counter the easing of restrictions. On Tuesday, the judiciary suspended the presidential body whose vote had triggered the restoration after complaints were filed. Mizan Online, the judiciary’s official site, announced that the cyberspace body’s decisions “will not take effect” until completion of a full legal review.

The blackout has been one of the longest national internet shutdowns ever recorded. The government began blocking access during the Jan. 2026 uprising, then relaxing some restrictions on Jan. 28. The backout was then reimposed and deepened after the outbreak of war on Feb. 28.

Executed: Abbas Akbari Feizabadi. Photo: Iran Human Rights

Another January uprising protester executed. Abbas Akbari Feizabadi, a protester arrested during the Jan. 8-9 demonstrations in Nain, Isfahan Province, was executed on Monday. The judiciary’s official site confirmed the execution, describing Akbari as an “armed leader” of the Nain protest.

Return of the Abraham Accords. U.S. President Donald Trump moved over the weekend to link any Iran settlement to a sweeping expansion of the Abraham Accords, posting on Truth Social that it should be “mandatory” for Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan simultaneously to normalize relations with Israel as part of any final deal. He said that this will “bring true Power, Strength, and Peace to the Middle East for the first time in 5,000 years.”

Pakistan rejected the proposal outright, while none of the other named countries has publicly responded. The move effectively raised Washington’s asking price at a moment when the core issues in the Iran talks remain unresolved. For an understanding of how the U.S. president’s statement might resonate in the broader Muslim world, I turned to my MBN colleague Abubakar Siddique, who told me this:

The most surprising part of Trump’s long post, which did not mention Israel by name, was his suggestion that Iran should join the agreements eventually.

“This will be the most important deal that any of these great, but always in conflict, countries will ever sign,” he wrote on his Truth Social website as he touted the potential benefits of the agreements named after the prophet Abraham, a foundational figure for Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. “Nothing in the past, or in the future, will surpass it.”

Trump said he discussed the idea during his phone call with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain, while briefing them on the latest diplomatic proposals to end the war with Iran.

Reports indicate that the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan, all of which do not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, “were surprised” by Trump’s proposal.

Rugby Sevens International Friendly, UAE v Israel in Dubai, 2021. Israel and UAE players with the Abraham Accord Friendship Cup trophy. Photo: Reuters.

Turkey established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1949, while Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with Israel in 1979 and 1994, respectively. The UAE and Bahrain were the first to sign the Abraham Accords during Trump’s first term in office in Sept. 2020. Since then, Morocco, Sudan and Kazakhstan have joined the agreements.

Unlike earlier peace treaties that ended conflicts or territorial disputes between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the Abraham Accords aim to establish broader bilateral relations, including defense and economic cooperation, between Israel and the signatory countries, all of which were not involved in territorial disputes or war with Israel.

Trump urged Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to sign the agreements immediately so that others could follow suit. Both countries, however, have been reluctant to join the agreements in the absence of solid Israeli guarantees for protecting Palestinian rights, including a clear roadmap to statehood. 

Saudi Arabia has been particularly cautious about joining the Abraham Accords, despite showing initial enthusiasm in 2020. Following the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has further distanced himself from normalizing relations with Israel’s far-right government.

“Trump could secure a commitment on paper from Saudi Arabia to eventually normalize, but the kingdom moved away from that goal over the past year,” one observer noted.

Doha has been largely silent about Trump’s suggestion but has previously rejected any unconditional normalization with Israel. Trump even urged Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to apologize to Qatar after an Israeli airstrike in September killed six people, including five Hamas members, in the Qatari capital.

Pakistan has firmly rejected the possibility of joining the Abraham Accords. The country’s defense minister, Khawaja Asif, stated “We have a very clear stance that this is not acceptable to us.”

In a sign that Islamabad is likely to face continued pressure from Washington to join the accords, Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of Trump, emphasized that “it is imperative that Pakistan give an answer now to President Trump’s call to join the Abraham Accords.”

Defectors and Spies (Cont. from Monday): The Long History of Western Converts in Iranian Service

Monica Witt and Marzieh Hashemi, whose stories I recounted in Monday’s edition of my newsletter, are the most recent stories of Westerners in the service of Tehran, but not the first. The Islamic Republic has drawn western converts into its orbit since its earliest years. Some have been intelligence agents, while others have worked in academia or the media. Together they spell out a consistent pattern of ideological recruitment.

The oldest and most dramatic case is Dawud Salahuddin, who was born David Theodore Belfield in North Carolina in 1950, converted to Shia Islam at Howard University in 1969, and was subsequently recruited by Iranian intelligence as a security guard at the Iranian Interest Section in Washington, DC. On July 22, 1980, disguised as a letter carrier, he shot dead Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a vocal anti-Khomeini dissident, on the doorstep of his home in Bethesda, Maryland. It is widely believed to have been the last successful Iranian assassination carried out on American soil. He fled to Iran the next day and has worked under the name Hassan Tantai in state-affiliated media and military circles ever since. Controversially, he played a role in a film set in Afghanistan in 2001.

Christine Levinson, wife of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, watches as her son Daniel Levinson displays a web print of his father’s picture to journalists while attending a news conference at Switzerland’s embassy in Tehran. Robert Levinson, who had retired from the FBI, vanished while on a business trip to Iran’s Kish Island. Photo: Reuters

Salahuddin is also the last person known to have seen Robert Levinson alive, the former FBI agent who disappeared on Kish Island in 2007 and is believed to have died in Iranian custody. The network that recruited him was described by a former State Department special agent as one “that was sponsored by the Iranian intelligence service, operated out of Washington, D.C., and primarily recruited black African American Muslim converts to do their bidding for them.” The template of targeting and cultivating ideologically susceptible American converts is the same one that produced Monica Witt four decades later. Marzieh Hashemi, an African American convert from New Orleans who became a Press TV anchor, served as Witt’s spotter.

Below the level of intelligence operations, Iran has also cultivated a softer category of western embed: credentialed academics and media figures operating inside the Islamic Republic’s institutions.

Gary Legenhausen, a New York-born philosopher who converted to Shia Islam in 1983 after encountering Muslim students while teaching at Texas Southern University, has been based at the Imam Khomeini Education and Research Institute in Qom since 1996, teaching Western philosophy and Christianity to Iranian seminary students. The institute was founded by Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, one of the Islamic Republic’s most hardline ideologues. Legenhausen is an unusual case of a credentialed American academic embedded in the Iranian clerical education system for three decades.

Rebecca Masterton holds a doctorate in francophone and Islamic mystical literature of West Africa from SOAS University of London and converted to Shia Islam in 2003. She is a regular presenter on Press TV, Sahar TV, and Ahlulbayt TV, all Iranian state-affiliated or aligned broadcasters, providing Tehran’s English-language media apparatus with an academically credentialed British voice.

The French philosopher Yahya Bonaud, who was born Christian Bonaud in Germany in 1957, lived in Mashhad, Iran for 15 years, teaching at Al-Mustafa International University, the Islamic Republic’s primary institution for training foreign Shia scholars and missionaries. He converted to Islam in 1979 after discovering the works of René Guénon, a French intellectual and mystic who converted to Islam; Bonaud later completed a Sorbonne dissertation on Khomeini’s philosophical writings. He died in a marine accident off Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in Aug. 2019, while on a speaking tour, and received formal condolences from then-parliament speaker Ali Larijani.

Cases of Westerners embracing the Iranian system for ideological reasons remain rare. But they are, arguably, significant nonetheless.

Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Abdullatif Al Zayani, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Donald Trump and United Arab Emirates (UAE) Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed participate in the signing of the Abraham Accords, Washington, DC, September 2020. Photo: Reuters

 ESSENTIAL READING: THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS AND THE WAR

“What to Know About the Abraham Accords as Trump Seeks Iran Deal” – Time, May 26, 2026.

“White House Calls Abraham Accords a ‘Complement’ to Iran War Deal” – Semafor, May 26, 2026.

“Saudi Arabia, the Abraham Accords, and Operation Roaring Lion” – Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, April 2026.

“How the Abraham Accords Fueled a New Era of Conflict” – Foreign Policy, May 7, 2026.