Iran International
Calls by former presidents Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami to end Iran’s war with the United States have triggered a fiercer political confrontation after they invoked public opinion in support of diplomacy rather than continued fighting.
Both men have called for an “honourable” end to the war, but Rouhani has gone further, arguing that public opinion should be taken into account in deciding whether Iran continues down the path of confrontation.
“Tell them that our plan is to fight the great powers of the world for another 20 years,” Rouhani said at a recent meeting with former officials. “If the people say they accept this, very well, let us continue. But if the people do not accept it and show us another way, do we not want to accept it?”
The argument has provoked a sharp backlash from hardliners, who say questions of war and national defence cannot be reduced to public opinion while the country remains under attack.
Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hardline Kayhan newspaper, accused Rouhani and Khatami on Tuesday of distorting reality, saying their calls amounted to “dishonourable and humiliating surrender” and would deliver the United States and Israel what they had failed to achieve through two wars.
The dispute comes amid renewed military escalation, with the United States and Iran again exchanging attacks after a relative lull and diplomatic efforts failing to produce a lasting settlement.
President Masoud Pezeshkian has nevertheless repeatedly argued that Iran should end the conflict while it remains in a position of “power and dignity,” pointing to inflation, sanctions and a sharp decline in foreign trade as reasons to reach a diplomatic understanding rather than prolong the confrontation.
But Rouhani’s appeal to public opinion has taken the debate into more contested political and constitutional territory.
“We must, according to the overwhelming majority of the people, end the war with dignity so that we can build the country …so that we can have hope for the future,” he said.
Rouhani did not explicitly call for a referendum, but his remarks revived one of the most sensitive arguments in Iranian politics: whether major questions of national policy should be put directly to voters.
Article 59 of Iran’s constitution allows the exercise of legislative power on major economic, political, social and cultural issues through a referendum and direct consultation of voters.
No referendum under the provision, however, has ever been held.
Former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei rejected calls for referendums to resolve major national disputes in 2023, arguing that ordinary people were not equipped to analyse complex political, economic and international questions.
That divide is now being reframed around the war.
Tabnak, a website close to Supreme National Security Council secretary Mohsen Rezaei, rejected Rouhani’s argument by recasting the choice itself.
“If a referendum is to be held, the question must be precise and honest: ‘Are the people in favour of defending the country against foreign attack?’ or ‘Do you allow the country to surrender?’” it wrote.
“The difference between these two questions is the difference between political analysis and playing with words.”
Tasnim, a news agency linked to the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), similarly attacked Rouhani as a symbol of a political current that had “simplified complex issues such as negotiations, peace and war.”
It accused the group of “naivety and wishful thinking,” arguing that they believed “a few legal clauses and two signatures” could resolve decades of tensions between Iran and the United States.
Kayhan argued that proposing a referendum during wartime would weaken Iran’s position and that turning the defence of territorial integrity into a factional issue amounted to shirking national duty and assisting the enemy’s pressure campaign.
The attacks have extended beyond the media. At a nightly gathering in a public square, one speaker said that with the Supreme Leader and the Supreme National Security Council in place, Rouhani had no right to take a position on the issue.
Hardline cleric and eulogist Mehdi Salahshour said on X that asking the public whether the war should continue or stop would “only destroy national resolve and sow seeds of doubt in the hearts of fighters on the battlefield and in the streets.”
The response has not been uniformly hostile.
Conservative news website Khabar Online noted that, with the exception of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has been largely silent in recent years, Iran’s other living former presidents had chosen to intervene at a critical moment.
“These days Khatami speaks of ‘honourable peace’ and Rouhani of a ‘dignified end’,” it wrote.
Moderate website Rouydad24 contrasted their interventions with what it described as the relative silence of reformists serving inside Pezeshkian’s government, arguing that Rouhani was articulating a position many Iranians had expected to hear from their representatives in government.
Mohammad Ali Sobhani, a former Iranian ambassador to Qatar, Jordan and Lebanon, also backed Khatami’s position, arguing that Iran could not leave the conflict suspended indefinitely.
“We must change the situation, bring the playing field towards dialogue and compromise so that the world supports us and we can impose peace on the other side,” he told Khabar Online.
Messages, videos and accounts sent to Iran International described deployments of police, special units and Basij forces in Tehran, Mashhad, Shiraz, Karaj, Isfahan, Tabriz, Birjand, Khorramabad, Khomein, Abadan and Qeshm.
Reports of slower internet connections also emerged from several cities, including Tabriz and Babol.
Petrol prices doubled on Monday for drivers buying fuel outside their monthly subsidised quota, rising from 50,000 to 100,000 rials a litre, about 2.3 to 4.5 US cents. The government announced the increase two days earlier.
Monthly subsidized allocations remain unchanged. Motorists can buy 60 liters at 15,000 rials per liter, about 0.7 cents, and another 50 liters at 30,000 rials, about 1.3 cents.
The dollar figures are negligible. The wages are the point. Average monthly pay in Iran is around 250 million rials, about $113 at Tuesday's rate, and many workers earn closer to 200 million, or roughly $90 a month.
Security forces gather around fuel stations
Several residents of Mashhad told Iran International that security forces appeared around petrol stations on Sunday, hours before the new price took effect.
“On Monday evening, I passed three gas stations. Several police vehicles were stationed outside each one, and at one station there were large numbers of Basij motorcyclists and special unit forces,” one resident said.
Another Mashhad resident described police and special units positioned at fuel stations across the city.
Video sent to Iran International from Khorramabad in western Lorestan province showed security personnel, vehicles and motorcycles deployed around the city, including what appeared to be a mounted machine gun.
Fuel supplies had already faced disruptions over the previous three weeks in areas including Razavi Khorasan, South Khorasan, Tehran and Alborz provinces.
Citizens in early September reported station closures, long lines, restrictions on purchases and waits of about two hours to obtain 10 liters of gasoline.
A Birjand resident said some filling stations had closed and displayed notices blaming “technical problems,” while police were positioned at others.
Similar deployments were described in Shiraz, where a local reported a large security presence around Maali-Abad early Tuesday, and in Karaj, particularly Fardis, Gohardasht and Mehrshahr.
A resident of Khomein in Markazi province also described a long line and numerous police officers at a fuel station on Shohadaye Daneshjoo Street.
Special units deploy in Tehran
Several Tehran residents reported increased security deployments from Monday evening, including in Shahr-e Rey and Salsabil neighborhoods.
“The station was heavily secured. Special units and the Basij were constantly moving around, and the streets were crowded,” a resident who visited a fuel station near Ferdowsi Square in central Tehran around midnight said.
Another who went to a station on Pirouzi Street in the east described long vehicle lines with special units positioned nearby.
People in Isfahan and Abadan also reported armed police at filling stations. In Qeshm, a resident said armed personnel were deployed around major squares on Monday evening and that a confrontation occurred at the entrance to a filling station in Dargahan.
Two messages from Tabriz described a large security presence alongside deteriorating internet service.
“The city of Tabriz is full of special units. The forces are armed, and heavy equipment can also be seen,” one said.
A Babol citizen also reported slower mobile and fixed internet connections, though the reason for the disruption could not be established.
Gasoline prices carry particular political sensitivity in Iran. A sudden increase and rationing in November 2019 triggered demonstrations across dozens of cities that quickly expanded into nationwide anti-government protests.
Security forces killed around 1,500 people during the crackdown, according to a Reuters tally at the time. Thousands were arrested and authorities imposed a nationwide internet shutdown.
Government defends higher gasoline price
First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref defended the new rate, arguing that even 100,000 rials per liter remains far below the government's cost of importing gasoline.
Imported gasoline costs the government more than 700,000 rials per liter, equivalent to about 30 cents, Aref said. Imported fuel would gradually be sold at prices closer to its cost, he added.
The government's figures for what petrol costs to produce have not held up well to examination. In November 2025, after officials put the cost at 340,000 rials a litre, about 15 cents at current rates, Iran International went through the refineries' own financial statements. They showed operating costs, excluding the value of the crude going in, of around 35,000 rials a litre, roughly 1.6 cents, a tenth of the official figure.
Economist Mousa Ghaninejad has estimated actual gasoline consumption inside Iran at about 70 million liters a day and argued that much of the remainder recorded as consumption is smuggled out of the country.
Iranians warn of knock-on price increases
Thousands of people responding to an Iran International question about the fuel increase focused on its potential impact beyond filling stations, warning that transportation costs could push up food prices, fares and other everyday expenses.
“100,000 rials for a liter of gasoline may just be a number for some people, but for people it means another step toward making life harder,” one respondent wrote.
Another said petrol was not the problem on its own, and pointed to food. A five-liter container of cooking oil that used to cost 22 million rials, about $9.90, now sells for 40 million, roughly $18.
On a monthly wage of 200 million rials, that is a fifth of a month's pay for one container of oil.
“We buy everything at expensive dollar-linked prices, but our base salary is only $100. Where in the world can you see something like this?” one person wrote.
Another said wages would have to rise alongside prices, since households could not absorb repeated increases on incomes that had barely moved.
For younger respondents the loss was smaller and more particular. "The feeling of going on a trip is gone. Going out for a 10-minute drive is gone. We young people said goodbye to small pleasures a long time ago," one wrote.
A mountain in the Zagros range in Isfahan province, about 1.5 kilometers south of the Natanz enrichment complex, with a large facility dug into it.
The name is a small accident of translation. The mountain is called Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, and kolang means pickaxe, so foreign analysts began calling the site Pickaxe Mountain. It is not what Iranians call the facility, and Iran has never given it a public name at all.
Because of the rock. Most of the surrounding range is sedimentary, but this mountain is hard, dense granite, which gives anything tunneled beneath it substantial natural protection.
Construction began in the autumn of 2020, months after an explosion destroyed an above-ground advanced centrifuge assembly plant at Natanz in an attack widely attributed to Israel. Iran said at the time that the underground halls would replace it.
The destroyed plant had been built to assemble roughly 6,000 advanced centrifuges a year, a capacity sized for the tens of thousands Iran expected to need as restrictions under the 2015 nuclear deal expired between 2025 and 2030.
Nobody outside Iran knows, which is the heart of the problem.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has never been given access. A double security perimeter, a fence and a wall with a patrol route, rings the entire mountain and joins Natanz's own perimeter. There are two pairs of tunnel entrances, one on the east side and one on the west. Analysts assume they lead to a single facility, but even that is not certain.
Iran has said the site is for producing and assembling advanced centrifuges. The Institute for Science and International Security, which has tracked the construction by satellite for years, judges the space beneath the mountain large enough to hold considerably more: not only an assembly plant but a working enrichment plant capable of producing weapons-grade uranium, and probably enough room for weaponization work such as casting uranium metal and shaping it into weapon components.
Two further claims circulate, neither verified. One is that part of Iran's stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent, estimated by the IAEA at around 440 kilograms, has been moved there.
The other, from an Israeli intelligence assessment reported by the Wall Street Journal, is that thousands of centrifuges were moved into the mountain last autumn. Neither Israel nor the United States has published evidence.
The institute's reading of the imagery is that the facility is not yet operational, and that construction continues.
At least 100 meters beneath the mountain, which stands 1,608 meters above sea level.
There is a detail in those measurements worth noticing. The eastern entrances sit about 145 meters below the ridge; the western entrances about 100 meters. That 50-metre difference between the two sets of doors suggests the facility may have more than one level.
Either way it is deeper than Fordow or Natanz, both of which the United States has bombed.
Not the mountain itself. The GBU-57, the largest conventional bunker-buster in the US arsenal, weighs about 13,000 kilograms and is reported to penetrate 18 meters of concrete or 61 meters of earth. Against 100 meters of granite, experts are skeptical.
But a buried facility still has to breathe, and that is where the vulnerability lies. Any working complex needs power, ventilation, heating and cooling, deliveries and people going in and out, and each of those connections surfaces somewhere.
There is a precedent for exactly this. Schematics have been published for two other Iranian tunnel sites built by the Amad nuclear weapons program, Fordow and Shahid Boroujerdi. Both showed ventilation shafts, and in both cases those shafts were directly targeted in air strikes, in June 2025 and March 2026 respectively, because they offered penetrating weapons a way further inside.
No schematics for Pickaxe Mountain have surfaced publicly, but a probable ventilation shaft near the eastern entrances was seen under construction in 2024, fed by a power line that runs above ground before disappearing underground.
The institute's assessment is that an attack would most likely aim at the power supply, the ventilation shafts and the open tunnel mouths, and it notes that as of imagery from July 9 the western pair of entrances remained open.
It also notes that hitting the hardened portals alone would probably deny Iran access only temporarily, adding the mountain to the list of sites that then have to be watched for attempts to dig back in.
Air defenses are not seen as an obstacle. Israel overcame them at Natanz in the opening hours of the June 2025 war.
There is a second possibility, and it has history behind it.
The institute judges that the site, as it now stands, would be more suitable for attack or sabotage by ground forces than from the air. Its model is the 2020 destruction of the Natanz assembly plant, which reportedly involved explosives brought into the building during its construction.
Pickaxe Mountain is still under construction.
That there is nothing there to bomb. Foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said in July that "no nuclear activity is taking place" at the site and called the American threats "a fabricated pretext for aggression, destruction, and sabotage."
Others have been less restrained. Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to the parliament speaker, called Pickaxe Mountain "the most heavily fortified nuclear facility in the world" and said a strike would "turn the region into hell."
Iran's joint military command has warned that any attack on nuclear or sensitive sites would widen the war.
July 13. On the Hugh Hewitt show: "We have eyes on it and Pickaxe mountain is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right in the front door. We're watching Pickaxe Mountain very closely. We don't see any activity there." He ended the interview more bluntly: "We're going to take out Pickaxe Mountain. Tell the Iranians to be ready."
July 21. After the Israeli intelligence assessment surfaced: "The new site that they're talking about, they're trying to possibly reconstitute a site, we'll hit that site. Any site where they're even thinking about nuclear, we'll be hitting it very, very powerfully." He said the US would hit the area "pretty soon, and very heavily."
July 28. "I know exactly what's going on at Pickaxe. It's not a big problem. We took out their nuclear sites, and we'll have to take out Pickaxe if we don't make a deal."
September 4. Trump said the US may hit the site very soon, crediting the Space Force for the intelligence. "We know everybody that's moving at Pickaxe, we know everybody that's moving everywhere, all over Iran, and if anything goes bad, we hit them. We hit them hard." He called the conflict a "military conflict" rather than a war, and added: "It's small potatoes for us."
Across two wars, the only recorded strike at the site destroyed a single vehicle on a spoil pile, thought to have been connected to air defense.
One explanation is simply that it is hard to destroy and may not yet contain anything worth destroying.
Iran has spent the interval hardening it further: concrete poured over a western entrance extension, a reinforced structure added at another portal, rock and soil pushed up over an eastern one, and by late April both eastern entrances partially backfilled to block vehicles.
A separate, smaller tunnel complex inside the same perimeter, built in 2007, was sealed shortly after the June 2025 war. What is inside it is unknown.
The other explanation is that Washington wants the option of getting in rather than burying it. Rebeccah Heinrichs of the Hudson Institute has suggested the United States may be preserving the possibility of entering or securing the complex, which would mean a ground operation rather than an air strike. There is no public evidence that one is being planned.
