Rents hit record high in Iran as housing inflation deepens

“Iran has been asking if the sanctions could be lifted. Iran has got very heavy US sanctions, and it makes it really hard for them to do what they'd like to be able to do. And I'm open to hearing that, and we'll see what happens, but I would be open to it,” Trump said.

Earlier this week, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said cooperation between the two countries was impossible as long as Washington continued to support Israel, maintain military bases, and interfere in the Middle East.

“As long as America supports the Zionist regime and interferes in the region, cooperation with it is neither rational nor possible,” Khamenei said on Monday.

Trump also said that the United States directed Israel’s first strike on Iran during the June conflict. “Israel attacked first. That attack was very, very powerful. I was very much in charge of that,” Trump told reporters late on Thursday.

“When Israel attacked Iran first, that was a great day for Israel because that attack did more damage than the rest of them put together.”

After taking office for his second term in January, Trump reimposed his maximum pressure campaign on Iran, a policy aimed at preventing Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. In June, the United States bombed Iranian nuclear sites, further straining ties between the two countries.

The two sides held five rounds of nuclear talks before a 12-day war between Iran and Israel in June. Negotiations have since stalled over uranium enrichment, with Western powers insisting Iran end enrichment on its own soil, a demand Tehran has rejected.

Last month, Khamenei described negotiations with the United States as “useless and harmful” and declared any talks with Washington forbidden. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also said no direct dialogue had taken place, adding that Tehran would discuss only nuclear matters and would never negotiate on regional issues.

The war between Israel and the Islamic Republic had lasted twelve days: missiles tracing parabolas over cities, generals vowing annihilation, state television baptizing destruction as victory.

Yet what reached me that night was not the language of battle but of exhaustion.

A mother whispered from Tehran: “We hear bombs every night. We have no quarrel with anyone.” A caller from Kermanshah, his voice trembling: “If Israel were our enemy, it would bomb the people of Iran. It doesn’t. Our enemy is here, in our own country.”

Those voices said what no Iranian newspaper dares print: this was not their war. It was the government’s.

The Dutch-based research institute GAMAAN, led by Iranian political scientist Ammar Maleki, has now measured what those voices intuited in a report released on Wednesday.

A crack in the wall

In its latest nationwide survey, 63% of Iranians described the recent Iran–Israel conflict as a war of the state, not of the people.

For the first time since 1979, data quantify an open rupture between ruler and ruled.

44% of respondents said Tehran instigated the war; only 16% believed it achieved anything. Even in a confrontation marketed as “resistance,” the public saw defeat.

Asked whom they blamed more—their own government or Israel—they chose their government by almost two to one.

These are not the cries of an enemy nation. They are the lucid admissions of a society that has stopped believing in its revolution.

The collapse of faith

For four decades, the Islamic Republic has thrived on an emotional economy of fear and sacrifice. “War is a blessing,” Ayatollah Khomeini once declared, and the state built an empire of endurance around that creed.

Martyrdom became its moral currency; hostility, its substitute for legitimacy.

But the GAMAAN figures reveal that the spell is broken. Nearly 70% of Iranians want the government to abandon its “Death to Israel” slogan. 62% favor direct negotiations with the United States. Nearly half want nuclear escalation to end. In a society long taught that compromise is betrayal, such pragmatism is radical.

Even religion—the last reservoir of the Islamic Republic’s sanctity—is ebbing.

Only 40% of Iranians now consider faith important in their lives; 57% say it is not. For a theocracy, that is not merely erosion. It is an existential reckoning.

The voices beneath the silence

As the program went on, the conversation widened. A war veteran from Golestan said he had fought eight years against Iraq, only to discover that “our real enemy was at home.”

Callers understood what the Islamic Republic cannot admit: that foreign hostility sustains domestic repression. A government unable to deliver dignity must deliver enemies instead.

A nation turning inward

If the 1979 revolution was born from a hunger for purity, the quiet revolution unfolding now is born from a hunger for normalcy.

Iranians want what most citizens of the world take for granted—work, safety, connection, a normal life. They are not turning West out of ideology but out of fatigue.

The same survey finds that more Iranians view the United States favorably (53%) than Russia or China, Tehran's chosen patrons.

After forty-five years of anti-Western indoctrination, that reversal is historic. What began as disillusionment has become a civilizational shift: a people disentangling their national identity from the myths that have imprisoned it.

The most dangerous peace

Authoritarian systems can survive rebellion, even sanctions. What they cannot endure is indifference. The most lethal threat to a system built on conflict is a population that no longer wishes to fight.

Today’s Iran is precisely that: a country where the government wages war while the nation quietly insists on peace.

The missiles may have ceased after twelve days, but the deeper conflict—between state ideology and what people actually want—continues.

And if the numbers are to be believed, the people are prevailing. Not with slogans or arms, but with fatigue, clarity and the unyielding will to live.

I ended the program that night by thanking everyone for their participation and slowly walked away from my studio thinking: There is still hope for my people.

Ahmad Baledi was hospitalized with about 70 percent burns and remains in critical condition, the rights group said.

The report said municipality workers, accompanied by police officers, arrived at the kiosk on Sunday without notice and began demolishing it.

Baledi's wife and son Ahmad staged a sit-in inside the kiosk to try to stop the demolition, but officers continued, Karun said.

The group said the deputy for municipal services in the district “behaved violently” and threw Baledi's wife out of the kiosk.

In protest at what was described as unjust and violent treatment, Ahmad Baledi poured gasoline on himself and set himself on fire in front of the officers.

Witnesses cited by Karun said some of the officers made no effort to stop him and watched with indifference and mockery.

The incident comes amid deepening economic hardship in Iran, where soaring joblessness and inflation have pushed many households into street vending, peddling, and other informal work to survive.

The self-immolation also echoes, in unsettling ways, the act by Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi that helped ignite the Arab Spring in 2011.

56-year-old Ali Ansari, also known as Aliakbar Ansari, is the registered owner of the property in an upscale North London neighborhood, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) said citing land registry records.

A 2017 French company filing lists the mansion as his residence, the report added. The home includes three reception rooms, eight bedrooms, an indoor pool, a cinema, games rooms and library.

According to the report, the mansion was not among previously reported UK real estate linked to Ansari, which includes a dozen other houses on the same street registered to Birch Ventures Limited, an Isle of Man-based company he owns.

Private Eye reported last month that the 12 homes were bought in 2013 for £73 million ($96 million).

The United Kingdom sanctioned Ansari on October 30, alleging corruption and claiming he helped financially support the activities of the Revolutionary Guards.

OCCRP said that in a previous response to the nonprofit investigative journalism organization, company spokesperson Iman Mirzaie said the allegations are baseless, emphatically denied, and political in nature.

Ansari is subject to an asset freeze, disqualification from any UK company ownership and a travel ban. He holds multiple passports, including from Iran, St Kitts and Nevis, and Cyprus, according to UK foreign office.

Ansari held stakes in Ayandeh Bank, one of Iran’s largest private banks, created in 2012 through a merger of a private bank and two credit institutions.

The bank came under scrutiny last month after it was ordered to merge with state-owned Bank Melli following the disclosure of losses exceeding $4 billion.

In a public letter, Ansari said the bank’s operations were halted as a result of decisions made outside its will.

Ayandeh Bank’s license was revoked last month and its operations dissolved.

OCCRP said it contacted a law firm representing Ansari and the UK Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation for comment but had not received a response.

The capital’s main reservoirs, including the Amir Kabir (Karaj) Dam, now hold less than 15 million cubic meters of water -- enough for less than two weeks of supply, authorities said.

Officials described Tehran’s surface water reserves as being in a “red and fragile” state, with no rainfall recorded since the start of the new water year in late September. 

“The reservoirs supplying Tehran are now at their lowest levels in 60 years, a situation we have never experienced before. Surface water resources are in a red and extremely fragile state,” said Mohsen Ardakani, head of Tehran’s Water and Wastewater Company.

“We are in a highly sensitive and risky phase,” Ardakani said. “Only through collective cooperation and at least 10 percent additional savings in water consumption can we prevent the capital from entering a state of absolute crisis.”

In Mashhad, officials said plans for regional water rationing were under review after many emergency wells ran dry. 

• 

  Iran says 67% of dams empty as autumn rains fail, capital braces for rationing

• 

  When water becomes a security threat

The city’s governor, Hassan Hosseini, said on Thursday that nighttime water cuts were also being considered and that completing ongoing transfer projects, such as the pipeline from the Hezar Masjed Mountains, required urgent funding of 50 trillion rials – about $46 million. 

In central Iran, Isfahan city council head Mohammad Noursalehi warned late last month that the region could face a drinking water crisis “within 45 days” unless non-potable uses are curtailed and delayed transfer projects are completed. 

The Zayandehrud Dam, which supplies over five million people in Isfahan and neighboring provinces, is at 13% capacity, raising concerns about both water shortages and land subsidence across the historic city.

Environmental experts say years of over-extraction, unscientific dam-building and poor management have pushed the country toward what some describe as “water bankruptcy.”

The meteorological organization forecasts no significant rainfall for the rest of November, leaving officials bracing for one of the most severe water crises Iran has faced in more than half a century.