Narges Mohammadi, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her human rights activism in Iran, has been allowed to go home. After guards found her unconscious in her cell, the apparent victim of a heart attack, she was granted temporary release from prison and transferred to a hospital, then allowed to return home after being discharged. She however still faces the threat of being taken back to jail.

Mohammadi has been repeatedly imprisoned for criticising the theocratic regime, demanding women’s rights, advocating for prison reform and campaigning against the death penalty. Over her lifetime she’s been sentenced to a total of 44 years. She’s already spent more than a decade behind bars, including 161 days in solitary confinement, and has also been sentenced to 154 lashes. In February she was handed a further seven-and-a-half-year sentence for ‘gathering and collusion’ and propaganda. From prison – where she experienced cardiac and blood pressure problems and severe weight loss – she has documented systematic rights violations against political prisoners, including sexual and physical abuse of women detainees, torture and extensive use of solitary confinement.

Mohammadi’s case is one among many. While her ordeal has rightly drawn international attention, others are at risk far from the spotlight. Three more women human rights activists – Pakhshan Azizi, Sharifeh Mohammadi and Varisheh Moradi – are on death row at imminent risk of execution. The dangers they and countless others face have grown sharply since the current war began.

Muddled motives

The latest Israeli-US war on Iran began on 28 February, having been preceded by a 12-day conflict in June 2025. Many civilians have been killed. The worst incident so far was a US missile strike on a girls’ school that killed over 170 people, mostly children. A shaky ceasefire came into effect on 8 April and has been repeatedly extended, but strikes continue. Israel is also waging an illegal war in Lebanon, where attacks haven’t stopped despite Donald Trump’s claim that the Iran ceasefire also applies there. Iran has retaliated by widening the conflict’s footprint, firing missiles at US allies including Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

When and how the war might end is unclear, because Israel’s and the USA’s aims are multiple and muddled. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly needs his country to be in a constant state of war to rally public opinion behind him as he still faces corruption charges and enduring anger over the security failures of the October 2023 Hamas attacks. The Iran war is broadly popular with the Israeli public, potentially giving Netanyahu an advantage ahead of an election later this year.

Netanyahu has made clear he hopes for regime change in Iran, and he evidently wants to keep the USA engaged in the regional conflict. The war also diverts international attention away from Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and escalating settler violence and illegal annexation in the West Bank. That may suit western states with no love for the Iranian regime, whose support for Israel has drawn mounting public criticism.

The USA’s aims are less clear. Trump, who once pledged not to mire the country in foreign wars, may see this one as a convenient distraction from low approval ratings and his many mentions in the Epstein files. Netanyahu appears to have succeeded in pulling him into a confrontation his predecessors  resisted. Trump’s erratic social media posts have offered few clues as to his ultimate goals, ranging from an apparent threat to commit war crimes, expressed in the statement that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’ to repeated declarations that the USA has already won the war and destroyed Iran’s military. Iran has hit back with a viral, regime-aligned social media campaign using Lego animations to mock the USA, and is widely seen to have won the narrative battle.

Trump also appears to have ignored warnings from US generals that Iran would exploit its control of the Strait of Hormuz to choke global oil and gas supplies. Around a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas is shipped through the strait, and Gulf crude is the kind that is easiest to refine into fuel. The region’s natural gas is also used to manufacture the agricultural fertilisers that underpin global food production.

Iran is currently blocking the strait and floating proposals to charge ships transit fees, a move complicated by sanctions, since payments to Iran could be classed as financing terrorism. The USA is blockading Iranian ports in response, worsening Iran’s already dire economic situation. Trump’s short-lived Project Freedom, a plan to use US Navy ships to guide stranded vessels out of the strait, collapsed when Saudi Arabia refused to back it. Most recently, Trump claims to have postponed a planned attack because ‘serious negotiations are now taking place’.

Around 1,500 tankers are currently stranded. The consequence of the war initiated by Netanyahu is higher prices for everyone, deepening cost-of-living pressures that are already fuelling a fresh wave of economic protests in several countries. Reckless acts of violence by powerful states that defy international law have global repercussions.

Repression tightens

On 1 March, an Israeli strike killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. But if the plan was regime change, it failed. Iran’s ruling theocratic structures run deep, with multiple layers of planned succession. Khamenei’s son Mojtaba Khamenei, injured in the same attack, was quickly named his replacement, despite Iran’s official ideology formally rejecting hereditary succession. The new leader is even more hardline than his father, while under Shia tradition Ali Khamenei now has martyr status, arguably strengthening the regime’s hand.

While many of the regime’s clerical leaders have been killed, Iran’s coercive apparatus has gained in its day-to-day power, hardening the theocracy into something closer to a military dictatorship, with the Basij, the paramilitary volunteer force long deployed to crush public dissent, now front and centre.

Israeli and US hopes that Iranians would rise up against the regime have also been disappointed. Iran has seen successive mass protest waves, each crushed with large-scale lethal violence. They include the Green Movement that demanded democracy in 2009 and 2010 and the Woman, Life, Freedom protests that demanded women’s rights in 2022 and 2023. The latest uprising came in December 2025 and January 2026, triggered by economic collapse, forging a movement that united broad sections of society to demand an end to the theocratic regime. The state suppressed it with shocking brutality, killing thousands and detaining tens of thousands.

By February, the uprising had been crushed. The Israeli-US intervention was unlikely to reignite a meaningful mass protest movement. If anything, for some Iranians the war has stoked patriotism and intensified enmity towards Israel and the USA. Some Iranians celebrated the early strikes, hoping they’d spark the fall of the regime, but the government has since mobilised numerous public demonstrations in its support. The anticipated revolt simply hasn’t happened.

Much of Iran’s vast diaspora has rallied in support of the war as a means of toppling the regime. But while the diaspora is united in demanding change, its array of ethnic minority organisations, Islamist factions, leftists, monarchists and republicans is bitterly divided over what should come after the theocracy. Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah, enjoys some support but others are wary of monarchical nostalgia and his close ties to Israel and the USA. The most credible potential unifying figures inside Iran are imprisoned or otherwise silenced.

Contrary to Trump’s claims, the regime is at no immediate risk of losing control. Instead, it has tightened its repression. Even as Iran’s leaders wage a social media propaganda war abroad, at home they’ve imposed a near-total internet shutdown, including a block on VPN services. The blackout has caused immense economic harm, disrupting businesses and financial transactions and hitting women the hardest. This comes on top of the economic effects of the US blockade, sending inflation and unemployment soaring.

Behind the cover of the internet shutdown and the distraction of the war, the government has accelerated executions of political prisoners. While precise figures are hard to get, rights groups report close to 200 executions so far this year, most preceded by prolonged torture to extract false confessions, with secret hangings now reportedly carried out on an almost daily basis. Among those killed are people detained during the January protests. On 4 May, it was reported that three people arrested at protests on 8 and 9 January – Ebrahim Dolatabadinejad, Mohammadreza Miri and Mehdi Rasouli – had been hanged at an undisclosed location. For families, the suffering doesn’t end there, as authorities reportedly refuse to return bodies and pressure relatives to stay silent.

Just as the economic effects have spread well beyond the conflict zone, so have civic space impacts. Governments in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE have warned residents against filming or sharing pictures of military activity. UAE authorities, long experts at recruiting social media influencers to burnish the country’s image, have detained several people merely for sharing footage of Iranian airstrikes.

Local priorities

Democracy and human rights in Iran depend on the regime’s departure. But the latest war isn’t about any of this, and it isn’t the way to achieve change. The regime appears entrenched and capable of surviving a longer conflict. Any peace deal would leave it intact, an outcome its rulers would treat as a victory.

Real change will come when protests can grow into a mass movement large enough to withstand the lethal repression the state will inevitably deploy. That can only happen with sustained support that respects the autonomy of local civil society leaders and strengthens their capacity. The immediate priorities are to protect credible local sources of information amid the information blackout and ensure the safety and security of Iran’s democracy and human rights activists.

Above all, states must press the Iranian government to halt executions and release everyone detained for speaking out, protesting or demanding change, beginning with Narges Mohammadi. Temporary medical release is nowhere near enough. The Iranian regime must let her be free.

Iran is currently on the CIVICUS Monitor Watch List, which identifies countries in which a severe and abrupt deterioration in the quality of civic space is taking place.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org