The son of Iran’s president has called for the internet restrictions in the country to be lifted, saying nothing will be solved by trying to postpone the moment when pictures and video circulate of the protests that were violently crushed by the regime.
With a battle under way at the top of the regime about the political risks of continuing to block Iran from the internet, Yousef Pezeshkian, whose father, Masoud, was elected in the summer of 2024, said keeping the digital shutdown would create dissatisfaction and widen the gap between the people and the government.
“This means those who were not and are not dissatisfied will be added to the list of the dissatisfied,” he wrote in a Telegram post. The release of videos showing the violence of the protests was “something we will have to face sooner or later”, Yousef Pezeshkian added. “Shutting down the internet will not solve anything, we will just postpone the issue.”
The sporadic lifting of restrictions is leading to a slow and painful inquest into how many protesters, including children, have died. Authorities launched a violent crackdown under cover of the internet blackout, with rights groups documenting several thousand dead. The Norway-based NGO Iran Human Rights says the final figure could be as high as 25,000. Thousands more people are still being detained.
Pictures of many of the dead children are appearing on internet sites inside Iran, while the director of Farabi eye hospital in Tehran, Dr Ghasem Fakhraei, said staff at the specialist ophthalmology centre had operated on more than 1,000 patients requiring emergency eye surgery since the protests. Hospital wards were overflowing, he said.
Molavi Abdolhamid, a prominent Sunni cleric and outspoken Friday prayer leader in Zahedan, south-east Iran, referred to the violent killing of protesters during January as an “organised massacre”.
Yousef Pezeshkian, a government adviser, said the risk of keeping Iran cut off from the internet was greater than that of a return to protests if connectivity were restored. He said security institutions must ensure security with the existence of the internet, which he called a necessity in life.
Pezeshkian, echoing comments of his father, said the protests had turned violent only because of professionally trained groups affiliated with foreigners, but added: “In the meantime the security and law enforcement forces may have made mistakes and no one is going to defend wrongdoing and that has to be addressed.”
Iranian journalists were openly reporting a dispute with government about whether it was safe to relax the internet, with the president and the communications minister, Sattar Hashemi, backing the move but the measure being opposed by Ali Larijani, the head of the supreme national security council.
Tehran’s stock market on Sunday was in the red for the fourth day in a row, and the Iranian currency, the rial, continued to fall against the dollar, one of the causes of the protests. The Central Bank of Iran said a debt issuance had only been 15% subscribed, a development that will require further government spending cuts or result in a rise in inflation, the official rate of which was more than 42% last month.
Although shops have opened, even newspapers close to the security services admit trading is low.
Iran’s computer trade organisation said the internet shutdown was costing $20m (£15m) a day, with lorry drivers also reporting it was difficult to cross borders because of the lack of electronic documentation.
One frustrated trader said they were being given 20 minutes of supervised access to the internet a day, enough to answer a small number of emails, but not enough to conduct business.
With the limited lifting of the restrictions, it is now possible to see pressure being applied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) narrative that the death toll is so high purely because of subversive activities of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency.
Gholamhossein Karbaschi, a reformist former mayor of Tehran, said: “People are in shock and amazed … If the agents of Mossad and foreign countries are at work, how did they suddenly carry out these disasters throughout the country? Where did they come from?”
He condemned the failure of the Pezeshkian administration to improve the economy. “The government in Iran is losing its original meaning. In no area can it be said the government is active, present and solving problems. All the other forces in the country are active and doing what they want except for the government. This government does not show any power in any area,” Karbaschi said.
Some of the protesters contacted by the Guardian in Iran blamed Donald Trump for failing to provide the help he had promised.
“He betrayed us,” said one. “Trump is more hateful to me than the supreme leader [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei because the ideology of Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is clear. Trump promised and kept saying he would shoot the person who shot you. Trump is the lowest of leaders the world has seen.”
Another said: “Bodies are intact, but hearts and minds are shattered. For a moment you feel happy that you have finally managed to get access to the internet. Then instantly guilt hits – what are you happy about it? Why are you still breathing, you useless person?”
They added: “We are honestly sorry for ourselves because first, God does not exist. Second, we have become so miserable that we are impatiently waiting for another country to attack our country, hoping it will save us. And even then, there is no guarantee that it will.”
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