Iran cabinet opposes parliamentary report on controversial 'infiltration' bill

Azimi, identified in Apple's prerecorded presentation as an image-quality engineer, presented a feature called Apple Reference Image during the segment on the iPhone 18 Pro's camera, which the company described as its most advanced to date.

Her appearance drew notice among Iranians for two reasons: her role in developing imaging technology at one of the world's largest companies, and her public opposition to the Islamic Republic, including her account of her own detention.

In a post on January 9, as protests spread across Iran, Azimi shared footage from the Vakilabad area of Mashhad and described being driven along the same street years earlier, blindfolded, in the back of an intelligence vehicle on her way to court.

"At the time, I did not know where we were going and thought these were the final minutes of my life," she wrote.

As the vehicle approached Park Square, she said, an interrogator told her to remove the blindfold, hold her head up and behave naturally. It was the hour she should have been in class at a nearby university. Looking out of the window, she recognized a close friend driving past.

"It felt like a dream," she wrote. "She was going toward her home, the safest place in the world, and I was a prisoner of the demon, with death before my eyes every second."

In the same post she praised those confronting the authorities as people seeking to "take back their rights from the bloodthirsty Islamic government," wrote that "now Vakilabad, Mashhad, Khorasan and all of Iran smell of freedom," and closed with the words Woman, Life, Freedom, the slogan of the uprising that followed Mahsa Amini's death in morality police custody in September 2022.

In a separate post in English after the January killings, addressed to non-Iranian friends and colleagues, Azimi described "the grief, the anger, the helplessness, the not-knowing," listed five Iranian human rights organisations and asked readers to donate.

Azimi's University of British Columbia profile records a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in 2009 and a master's in electrical and computer engineering from UBC in 2014.

The feature she presented on Tuesday captures digitally signed data from the camera sensor and produces an unalterable reference image against which a finished photograph can be checked, in the manner of a digital negative.

Apple said it was intended for photojournalists, photographers and anyone seeking to distinguish an authentic image from one edited or generated by artificial intelligence.

The barter-like arrangement allowed Tehran to turn payments for Iranian oil into credits for Chinese imports without sending money directly through international banking channels, Reuters said, citing two senior Iranian sources and three other people familiar with the mechanism.

Iran used the system to buy medicines, vehicles and communications equipment, while it was also used in connection with contracts worth millions of dollars to supply Iran with air defense equipment over the past year, the sources said.

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  Iran set to receive Chinese shoulder-fired air defense systems - Reuters

Billions routed outside normal banking channels

The mechanism has been operating since at least 2021 but has become more important as Washington tightened sanctions on Iran and companies doing business with Tehran, according to the report.

A buyer acting on behalf of Chinese state-owned oil trader Zhuhai Zhenrong had, at least until this year, deposited hundreds of millions of dollars a month with a China-based financial entity known as ChuXin, three people familiar with the arrangement told Reuters.

Those payments covered Iranian oil purchases. ChuXin then sent funds to Chinese exporters and companies involved in infrastructure projects in Iran, likely through other Chinese financial institutions, Reuters reported.

Around 70% of the Iranian oil proceeds handled through the arrangement went to infrastructure projects, while the rest entered accounts belonging to a special purpose vehicle, or SPV, used to pay suppliers of goods to Iran, the sources said.

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  Secret documents expose new network selling sanctioned Iranian oil

The two Iranian sources confirmed the existence of the SPV, which Reuters said had not previously been reported.

Oil exchanged for access to Chinese goods

The SPV is managed by two entities, one acting on behalf of China's Ministry of Commerce and another linked to Iran's central bank, according to all five sources.

When Iran's central bank approves an importer to use funds held in the SPV, the Iran-linked entity informs its Chinese counterpart so payments can be made to suppliers, three of the sources said.

The structure gives Chinese manufacturers access to payment without dealing directly with Iran, according to the report. Reuters said there was no indication that the Chinese manufacturers supplying civilian goods had broken sanctions.

Reuters could find no record of a financial institution called ChuXin in Chinese corporate registries, and one source said it may exist only on a spreadsheet.

• 

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China says unaware of arrangement

China's foreign ministry told Reuters it was "not familiar with the situation you describe" when asked about the mechanism.

"China has consistently opposed unilateral sanctions that have no basis in international law and have not been authorized by the United Nations Security Council," the ministry said.

Iran's UN missions in New York and Geneva did not respond to Reuters requests for comment. Iran's central bank, China's commerce ministry, the National Iranian Oil Company and Zhuhai Zhenrong also did not respond to questions about their reported roles.

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  Iran has only 30 million barrels of oil left for China, Bessent says

US pressure raises stakes

China has long been the main buyer of Iranian oil. More than 80% of Iran's shipped crude went to China in 2025, averaging around 1.4 million barrels per day, according to Kpler data cited by Reuters.

The arrangement has helped Tehran keep trade flowing despite years of sanctions, while giving China access to discounted Iranian crude.

Its importance has grown as the United States has increased economic pressure on Iran during the six-month-old war. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned countries in August to cut business ties with Tehran or risk losing access to the dollar-based financial system.

• 

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Reuters said it could not determine how the US naval blockade on Iranian oil exports had affected the China trade mechanism. No Iranian crude cargoes had successfully passed through the Strait of Hormuz to China since the blockade was reinstated on July 14, according to the news agency.

A UN embargo on exports of most major conventional weapons to Iran was restored in September 2025 along with other sanctions.

Andrea Ghiselli, an international politics lecturer at the University of Exeter who studies China's relations with the Middle East, told Reuters that Beijing wanted to resist US pressure without putting major Chinese banks and companies at risk of exclusion from the international financial system.

"They want plausible deniability," he said.

Nour News, a website close to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said Wednesday that the latest escalation showed signs of reversing the logic of the blockade.

“The US naval blockade was supposed to target Iran’s economic resilience by cutting or restricting its export routes,” it said.

But with both sides now attacking tankers and military vessels and traffic through Hormuz again sharply reduced, “the cost of the blockade is no longer distributed solely on the Iranian side.”

The Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) said Wednesday that Iranian forces had responded to US attacks on five Iranian tankers by targeting two US warships and eight oil tankers, as well as 10 “violating vessels” attempting to pass through Iran’s restricted zone in Hormuz.

The US denied that its warships had been hit.

‘An eye for an eye’

Iran is now threatening to widen that confrontation geographically.

IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi said a new restricted area would extend from the direction of Chabahar through parts of the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea along routes leading towards Hormuz. Its precise coordinates have yet to be announced.

The IRGC has also warned tankers and other vessels at ports and anchorages in Kuwait and Bahrain to leave, threatening those that remain.

Ships entering without Iranian permission would be placed on a sanctions list and denied maritime, insurance and other services, Mohebbi said, including during future passages through Hormuz.

Conservative political activist Amir Chizari, who is close to parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, advocated going further, calling for Iran to prevent ships from using ports in Persian Gulf countries hosting US military bases.

“Head for head, eye for eye—that means all these ports will be blockaded by Iran,” he wrote on X.

Nour News said the significance lay not simply in creating another restricted zone but “in changing the logic of confrontation with the blockade.”

“Tehran does not necessarily need to seize a ship to change the behaviour of an actor; it is enough for the cost of interacting with a vessel or network to rise so that the other side retreats in advance,” it said.

Diplomacy narrows

The increasingly expansive strategy comes as prospects for reviving diplomacy appear to be shrinking.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tuesday that a US return to its commitments and the Islamabad understanding would “pave the way for a return to normality.”

But Middle East Eye reported Wednesday, citing two sources close to the Iranian government, that President Donald Trump had conveyed through Pakistani and Qatari officials that Washington would not return to the previous understanding.

The absence of a diplomatic route raises the stakes of Iran’s strategy: Tehran is betting that making the blockade more expensive for Washington, commercial shipping and regional states will eventually create pressure to ease it.

A costly gamble

Inside Iran, critics warn that the same strategy could inflict enormous damage on the country itself.

Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, a conservative former chairman of parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, accused hardliners of risking Iran’s tanker fleet.

“The National Iranian Tanker Company is the largest tanker company in the world. They are setting the country’s unparalleled wealth on fire. This Iran-burning must end,” he wrote on X.

Hardliners counter that such economic calculations make little sense when they believe Iran faces an existential threat.

One user responding to Falahatpisheh asked what guarantee Iran had that peace would last if it compromised now, or that the United States would not attack again months later.

The costs of escalation are already becoming apparent. Brent crude rose above $100 a barrel Wednesday, while flows through Hormuz fell as low as two million barrels a day after reaching eight to nine million before fighting resumed.

In Iran, the dollar rose above 2.33 million rials on the foreign exchange market, another record low for the national currency.

Iran’s strategy amounts to a gamble that widening the geographic and economic costs of the blockade will eventually make it harder to sustain. But the deeper Tehran extends the confrontation beyond Hormuz, the greater the risk that those costs return to Iran itself.

Their warnings come amid rising tensions in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz and growing concern that renewed military confrontations could escalate into a broader conflict.

Conservative lawmaker Gholamreza Tajgardoon on Tuesday urged Iranians to be prepared to “pay a price for their resistance.”

But several moderate and reformist figures have argued that years of sanctions, inflation and now war have left ordinary people with little capacity to absorb further economic pressure.

“Right now, in certain border and maritime regions, we are witnessing tension, conflict and military engagements,” veteran reformist figure Mohammad Atrianfar told Khabar Online on Tuesday. “One of the public’s serious concerns is whether these conflicts will lead to a full-scale war.”

Atrianfar said preventing a return to widespread war was an “unavoidable necessity” and called for clear red lines and emergency communication channels to help manage the conflict.

His comments come amid US strikes on Iranian tankers and Iranian attacks on American bases and warships in the region.

Atrianfar argued that diplomatic compromise should not automatically be treated as capitulation, saying the distinction between an honourable compromise and a damaging retreat depended on whether an agreement served national interests and restored stability.

Moderate political figure Mansour Haghighatpour made a similar argument, pointing to inflation and what he described as growing public exhaustion.

While Iran should maintain its ability to defend itself against foreign threats, he said, “the priority should remain securing a peace that guarantees national interests.”

His comments appeared to respond directly to Tajgardoon’s appeal for Iranians to accept the costs of resistance. Expecting people to endure continuing hardship without diplomatic progress was becoming untenable, Haghighatpour said.

Reformist politician Mahmoud Mirlohi focused on the physical and economic risks of a drawn-out conflict, warning that critical infrastructure, including power and petrochemical facilities, could become targets.

“Prolonged war and harsh sanctions have pushed Iranian society to its limits,” he said, arguing that Iranians needed “a chance to breathe.”

Mirlohi also criticised what he described as “extremist rhetoric and maximalist behaviour” at home, saying portraying Iranian political figures as advocates of continued war or nuclear escalation made diplomacy more difficult.

The increasingly public warnings reflect a broader argument within Iran over not only how the war should end, but how much more economic and social pressure the population can reasonably be expected to bear.

Hamidreza Jalaeipour, a reformist political figure generally supportive of the existing system, said Iranians had already endured more than two decades of sanctions, high inflation and stagnant economic growth.

He claimed more than 40% of the population was now below the poverty line and warned that “prolonging a war of attrition exacerbates this severe economic strain and risks severe public fatigue.”

“Iran needs realistic governance rather than radical idealism,” Jalaeipour said, accusing hardliners and partisan media of obstructing the flexibility needed for diplomacy and risking greater social unrest.

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.