Iran May Soon Release British-Iranian Zaghari-Ratcliffe - Lawyer

Hackers posted on the website photos of leaders of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), Maryam and Masoud Rajavi, as well as a photo of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei with a large red X, drawn on his face.

The MEK website claimed "rebel groups" that support it had defaced 62 portals, 77 servers, 280 computers of the ministry and wiped out 30 terabits of dataincluding backup files of all servers of the ministry in Tehran and in several provinces. The report said the ministry sent all employees home until further notice due to the systems damage.

While Masoud Rajavi is widely thought dead, the MEK insists he is merely in hiding waiting his return to Iran. The MEK allied to Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 Iran war and helped the Iraqi dictator put down the 1991 risings in Iraq, when tens of thousands died.

In 2003, MEK, according to the United States army’s official account, fought with Iraqi troops against the US-led invasion, but despite Iraqi calls for the group to be held accountable over human-rights violations the US relocated the MEK in 2013 from bases in Iraq to Albania, where they run a well-financed media and social media operation.

In January, a MEK spokesman said a ten-second hacking of several television and radio channels of Iranian state broadcasting might have been done by supporters in Iran. The hackers put up pictures of the Rajavis, and one of Khamenei in a gun sight. The Iranian leader was badly wounded in 1981 in one of many bombings attributed to the MEK.

On February 1, the web-based streaming platform of IRIB, Telewebion, was hijacked in the middle of a live broadcast of the Iran-United Arab Emirates soccer match, broadcasting calls to rebellion as “the regime’s foundations are rattling.”

In August 2021, a mystery hacktivist group calling itself Tapandegan (Palpitations), previously known for the 2018 hacking electronic flight arrival and departure boards in Mashhad and Tabriz, released security camera footage from Tehran's Evin prison. Tapandegan said the images came from hackers called Edalat-e Ali (Ali's Justice) and were being circulated to draw attention to prisoner abuse.

In October 2021, gas stations in Iran were hit by an attack disrupting payments, leading to long queues for two days that prevented customers using the government-issued electronic cards for subsidized fuel. ‘Predatory Sparrow’ claimed responsibility, but Iranian officials blamed outside forces, widely taken to refer to Israel.

The MEK was listed by the US from 1997 to 2012 as a ‘foreign terrorist organization,’ but was subsequently removed from the list. The group has cultivated links with many politicians in the US and Europe, paying large sums for attendance or speeches at MEK rallies.

Iranian state television said an Israeli officer first contacted a neighbor of an employee of the uranium enrichment plant and managed to recruit them both after paying them in cash and digital currency.

Revolutionary Guards security agents were monitoring the network and were able to break it up before the sabotage could be carried out, arresting an unspecified number of people, the television said.

The state news agency IRNA said a new agency called Revolutionary Guards Nuclear Command, which it said had been set up to oversee defense and security matters at nuclear installations, was involved in the operation to stop the planned sabotage.

Iran has accused Israel of carrying out several attacks on facilities linked to its nuclear program and of killing its nuclear scientists over the past years. Israel has neither denied nor confirmed the allegations.

Iranian security agencies in the past have claimed arrests of spies and “terrorists” but have not produced any evidence and or follow up information about trials and possible sentences.

Israel confirmed reports late Monday that several websites, including its government site, were disrupted by a "broad cyberattack". The Iranian IRGC cyber army has attacked Israeli websites in the past.

With reporting by Reuters

Gantz made the remarks on Monday during a symposium commemorating Menachem Begin, founder of the Likud party. Begin was Israeli prime minister in 1982 at the time of the invasion of Lebanon and of Operation Opera, aka Operation Babylon, an airstrike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor.

“To deal with the Iranian aggression now requires political responsibility, prudent conduct and operational determination − and not hollering from the podium,” Gantz said.

He went on to say that Israel should do whatever it can, with or without the cooperation of its allies, to keep its security intact, adding, “We don’t have the privilege to lose even a single battle”.

Gantz claimed there were parallels between Begin and Yitzhak Rabin, the Labor prime minister killed in 1995 by a right-wing extremist two years after he signed the 1993 ‘Oslo Accords’ with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. “They saw themselves as fighting for Israel’s security and fighting for peace,” Gantz said.

Heading a military delegation, deputy chief of the Israeli Defense Forces Herzi Halevi landed in the US Monday for meetings with security officials at the Pentagon over how Washington might react to Iran firing missiles Sunday at Iraq’s Erbil in response to an Israeli airstrike on Damascus that killed two Iranian soldiers.

The dust was coming from within Iran and from outside, Ali Mohammad Tahmasbi Birgani said. This was an international challenge, he said, needed action including through the United Nations Development and Environment Programs and the Asian and Pacific Centre for the Development of Disaster Information Management: “We have a large number of bilateral and multilateral agreements with neighboring countries, including Iraq, Syria and Turkey, but no operational action has been taken.”

A report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in February projected temperatures in the Middle East and North African will rise “by at least 4°C by 2050 − that is, if greenhouse gases continue to increase at the current rate − and heat waves are set to be experienced ten times more frequently by the same year.”

Carnegie predicted growing migration, food insecurity and conflicts over resources: “In addition to increased water scarcity, climate change will produce increased aridity in parts of the MENA region in the next century, thus shrinking arable lands and disrupting agricultural patterns. Moreover, already dry soil is set to become drier, and desert dust will increasingly accumulate in the atmosphere and create more sandstorms, especially in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.”

Dust storms and other pollutants have increased markedly in recent years in several Iranian provinces, including Khuzestan, Kermanshah, and Sistan-Baluchestan.

In a report Monday, Bloomberg cited “five people familiar with the matter” that the UAE and Israel believe they can use the Ukraine crisis and rising oil prices to extract concessions from Washington over intelligence and defense they were previously denied.

The UAE has bought billions of advanced weapons from the US, with one deal alone under the Trump administration put at $23.5 billion. US annual military aid to Israel is over $3.5 billion.

The two countries, which established diplomatic relations in 2020, have both received criticism in the US for equivocating over the Russia intervention in Ukraine, with Israeli premier Naftali Bennett heading to Moscow to mediate and the UAE abstaining on UN votes.

Bloomberg reported the two are coordinating in the belief that the situation is favorable to a shared approach towards the US, arguing that Iran’s foreign exchange income, and therefore its defense capacity, would be boosted if US sanctions are eased with a revived nuclear agreement.

According to the report, a senior Biden administration official said there were discussions about Iran, but did not confirm any commitment to a new plan. Iran’s Sunday missile attack at Erbil, northern Iraq, in response to an Israeli air strike a week earlier that killed two Iranian officers in Damacus, highlighted continued region tensions.