Welcome back to the MBN Iran Briefing. You can read it in Arabic here, and check out MBN’s flagship Arabic-language Alhurra news platform (also in English).
Five months into the war, Hormuz diplomacy keeps producing the same collapse on repeat, and ordinary Iranians are increasingly financing their own healthcare on credit. Also this week: Iran’s first public hangings of 2026, and Saudi Arabia’s slide from declared neutrality to fighting alongside the U.S.
Find out more below, and share your thoughts, analysis, and predictions with me at ailves@mbn-news.com. If you were forwarded the MBN Iran Briefing, please subscribe.
And don’t forget to check out the latest Iran Briefing podcast. In this edition I’m joined by MBN’s Editor-in-Chief Leila Bazzi, just back from spending time in the region, and Senior Correspondent Abubakar Siddique, as we take up how five months of war have turned Iran’s fight from one with the U.S. and Israel into one with its Arab neighbors, why Tehran’s own hardliners may be overplaying their hand, and what’s really happening in Beirut and Baghdad behind the official talking points. Leila also tells us why she thinks the region’s real test ahead isn’t about redrawing borders at all, but about who ends up controlling the gates.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Any European naval vessel that approaches the Strait of Hormuz would be a legitimate target for us.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi
TOP OF THE NEWS
Tehran Assesses Its War Damage
Iranian government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said at a Tuesday briefing that the extent of damage to the country’s airports has now been determined. A missile strike at Bushehr airport left it completely out of service, with wreckage so extensive that officials say it will need to be rebuilt from the ground up. She added that, separately from Bushehr, 12 bridges and two tunnels in Hormozgan province were hit as part of the renewed wave of strikes on July 17 and 18.
At the same briefing, Mohajerani said more than 350 government employees, including engineers, utility workers, nurses and doctors, have been killed in the line of duty since the war began five months ago.
Then there’s Iran’s broader financial reckoning of the war. In mid-April, Mohajerani gave an estimate of $270 billion in damage, a figure that has not been publicly updated since, though costly infrastructure losses keep surfacing in briefings like this one. As for the human toll, Tehran’s own headline number has been just as static. In mid-April, the Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs said the war had produced 3,468 martyrs. That doesn’t mean Tehran has stopped counting casualties, though. The Health Ministry has continued issuing narrower, period-specific tallies for the renewed fighting, reporting 55 killed and 629 wounded in strikes in the past month.
Tehran keeps focusing publicly on Minab, where a missile destroyed an elementary school on the war’s opening day. The state has even announced the building of a Museum of the Martyrs of Minab School for Tehran’s Saadabad Palace complex.
Executed in Iran’s first public hangings of 2026: January protesters Abolfazl Sepahi Badjani and Amirhossein Safari Hosseinabadi. They were executed at 3:40 AM on Tuesday, timed to the call to morning prayer. Photo: iranhr.net
Iran Carries Out Its First Public Hangings of 2026
Two men, Abolfazl Sepahi Badjani and Amirhossein Safari Hosseinabadi, were hanged publicly in Isfahan’s Alikhani Square at 3:40 AM on Tuesday, timed to the call to morning prayer, after a crowd that had gathered overnight trying to stop the executions was met with violent force from security personnel. Several people were reportedly arrested. In a break from the pattern of covert hangings used in every other case this year, these were the first executions Iran has carried out in public in 2026.
Both men were among sixteen people indicted in the Alikhani Square case, over the deaths of four security officers at Alikhani Square on Jan. 8, the same square where they were hanged this week. Two other defendants in that same case, Gol-Mohammad Mohammadi and Erfan Esfandiari, were executed outside of the public eye on July 19.
Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of Iran Human Rights, said the Islamic Republic was “resorting once again to the medieval practice of public hangings” to “instill fear throughout society and deter future protests.” The regime’s own account casts the two men as central figures in the killing of four security officers during the protests in January. They were convicted on charges including “waging war against God” and “corruption on earth,” the same expansive national-security charges the judiciary has used throughout this wave of prosecutions, after state television aired the defendants’ forced confessions, faces blurred, in a propaganda broadcast back in January, well before any of them had a real trial.
The two hangings are not an isolated case: Iran has now executed at least 26 protesters in connection with the Dec. 2025-Jan. 2026 unrest. Separately, more than 70 protesters from that same wave of protests remain on death row at Isfahan’s central prison alone. Of the 16 people originally indicted in the Alikhani Square case, 14 had already been moved into pre-execution solitary confinement as of July 21, a number that has since dropped to 12 with this week’s two executions, among them 18-year-old Shervin Bagherian, whose sentence has not yet been confirmed by Iran’s Supreme Court. The executions are accelerating rather than winding down.
A man walks near damage at a site belonging to Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) following airstrikes carried out by U.S. and Saudi forces. Photo: Reuters
Saudi Arabia’s Slow Slide into the War
On Tuesday, U.S. and Saudi fighter aircraft carried out their first publicly acknowledged joint strikes of the war, hitting Iran-aligned militia sites across eastern Iraq after Houthi drones out of Yemen and Iran-backed militia drones out of Iraq hit Saudi oil facilities within a 24-hour span, part of a broader barrage of more than 30 IRGC-directed drone attacks over the preceding three days.
This is the most overt shift in Saudi Arabia’s relationship to the war in the past five months. When the fighting began on Feb. 28, Saudi Arabia declared itself neutral, refused to let the U.S. use its territory or bases to strike Iran, and worked Gulf Cooperation Council channels and back-channel contacts with Tehran to protect the rapprochement the two countries had built since China brokered a détente in 2023.
In the kingdom’s first known strikes on Iranian soil, Saudi Arabia carried out its own covert airstrikes inside Iran in late March, following weeks of Iran-aligned drone and missile attacks on Saudi infrastructure. Riyadh notified Tehran afterward, and the exchange fed into an unofficial de-escalation understanding that held for months even as the UAE, pursuing a more openly hawkish line, struck Iranian oil infrastructure of its own around the same time.
Tuesday’s joint strikes demonstrate that the tacit understanding has visibly broken down. Riyadh has moved from hiding its own retaliation to publicizing it alongside Washington.
Hormuz Diplomacy vs. Reality
Iran fired ballistic missiles at the U.S.-Jordanian Muwaffaq Salti Air Base on Tuesday, which CENTCOM said were all intercepted. This ended a pause in U.S.-Iran strikes that had given Omani mediators room to negotiate a Hormuz reopening in Tehran. It is at least the fourth futile attempt since February to manage or reopen the strait, and it follows the same pattern as the previous three. An April 8 ceasefire that nominally reopened the waterway broke down quickly. A 14-point framework signed by U.S. President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in mid-June, brokered by Pakistan with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, promised a toll-free reopening and frayed within about a week after an Iranian drone strike on a ship in the strait. Oman’s corridor-management proposal remains unfinalized as of this week. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed to commercial shipping since Iran’s Revolutionary Guards shut it in the war’s opening days, and five months on, the pattern with every attempt to reopen it has been the same: a deal or pause is announced, then collapses within days to weeks, usually over a fresh incident.
The clearest sign of how durable the industry expects this pattern to be can be found in the insurance market: war-risk premiums for tankers transiting the strait have climbed to between 3 and 10 percent of a vessel’s hull value up from roughly 0.25 percent before the war.
An Iranian woman buys medicine from a pharmacy in Tehran. Photo: AFP.
Drug Shortages and Healthcare on Credit
The head of Iran’s Food and Drug Organization, Mehdi Pirsalehi, said the number of medicine items in official shortage has fallen to 43, down from 341 in 2022. He credited better inventory management and expanded domestic generic production, though he also acknowledged some hospitals still cannot get medication from distributors because of unpaid debts that have piled up for one to two years.
The same dysfunction is taking place one step further down the chain, with treatment now increasingly offered on an installment basis, where patients get treated first and pay afterward, not as a convenience but because many can no longer pay upfront at all. Next month’s income is already spoken for by rent, other debts, and inflation running near 60 to 90 percent, so the deferred bill doesn’t get paid off so much as folded into the next round of borrowing. As one report puts it, “the patient is forced to borrow from next month’s income for today’s pain.” Dental clinics now advertise repayment plans running anywhere from three to 12 months on one platform to two to 24 months on another, because “the toothache does not wait until next month’s paycheck.” Pharmacies sell some prescription medicines and supplements the same way, split into four payments. Patients bargain with doctors over the size of a bill before a prescription is even written, stretch psychotherapy sessions across paydays, and stop physiotherapy or medication partway through, not because the pain stopped but because their funds did.
Nobody in the payment chain is being paid promptly. Distributors wait one to two years to be paid by hospitals, and further down the same chain, patients are increasingly financing treatment themselves through installment plans, paying clinics and pharmacies back over months instead of upfront. Even medicine is increasingly being sold on credit.
