Under Cover of War
How the Islamic Republic used the 2025 conflict with Israel to intensify the arbitrary arrest, torture, and execution of political prisoners — while the prisoners themselves became casualties of the war.
When Israel and Iran went to war for twelve days in June 2025, the fighting did not stay at the front. It reached inside Iran's prisons — and it became a pretext for what followed. As missiles fell, the Islamic Republic launched one of the most sweeping waves of repression in its recent history: thousands of arbitrary arrests, a fast-tracked expansion of the death penalty, and a surge of executions that monitors say has continued, under the cover of national emergency, long after the ceasefire.
This briefing draws together the documentation of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and Iranian human rights organizations to describe what was done to political prisoners and detainees in Iran during and after the war — and to put names to some of those at risk.
A twelve-day war, and a pretext
On 13 June 2025, Israel launched a wide-ranging attack on Iran. The escalation that followed — the Twelve-Day War — killed more than 1,100 people in Iran and wounded over 5,600 before a ceasefire took hold. (Amnesty International)
From the first day, the Iranian state turned the emergency inward. Beginning on 14 June, authorities arrested more than 700 people on accusations of "collaboration" or "espionage" for Israel. Within days, parliament moved to fast-track legislation making such "cooperation with hostile governments" automatically punishable by death as "corruption on earth" (efsad fel-arz).
Human rights monitors warned at once that the war had handed the authorities a license: a way to recast long-standing political prisoners, protesters, journalists, lawyers, and ethnic-minority activists as wartime enemies — and to accelerate executions and arrests behind a wall of national-security secrecy.
We found reasonable grounds to believe that, in carrying out the airstrikes on Evin prison, Israel committed the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against a civilian object.
— Sara Hossain, Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, to the UN Human Rights Council, March 2026
A "tsunami" of arbitrary arrests
Human Rights Watch described the wave of detentions that followed the war as a "tsunami of arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances." Arrests were carried out without warrants — in home raids and at checkpoints — sweeping up journalists, lawyers, students, teachers, and ordinary social-media users accused of sharing footage or merely calling for peace. (Human Rights Watch)
Many of those seized were held incommunicado in undisclosed locations, their families given no information about where they were or whether they were alive. Ethnic minorities — Kurds, Baloch, and Afghan nationals — were targeted with particular intensity, a long-documented pattern that the war only sharpened.
By early 2026, monitors counted thousands detained on national-security grounds, layered on top of the tens of thousands arrested during the protests that swept the country in late 2025 and January 2026.
The prison itself became a target
At around midday on 23 June 2025, Israeli airstrikes hit Tehran's Evin Prison — the country's most notorious holding site for political prisoners — striking multiple buildings across the complex during visiting hours. The library, the clinic, the prosecutor's office, the visitation hall, and cell blocks were damaged or destroyed. Iranian authorities reported around 80 people killed, among them prisoners, guards, medical staff, and visiting family members. (HRW; Amnesty)
Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International concluded the attack was an apparent war crime; in March 2026 the UN's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission found "reasonable grounds" that it was a deliberate strike on a civilian object.
Loaded onto buses in the night
The danger did not end with the bombing. On the night of the strike, prisoners from Evin's wards 4, 7, and 8 — home to many political detainees — were forcibly loaded onto buses by armed guards and moved without any legal process. Men were sent to the harsh Greater Tehran Penitentiary (Fashafouyeh); women to the notorious Qarchak prison. Rights groups reported that detainees were handcuffed, shackled, not even allowed to collect their belongings, then held in degraded, overcrowded conditions. (HRW; Iran HRM)
Prisoners were transferred at gunpoint in the middle of the night, shackled and with nothing but the clothes they wore, to facilities without adequate water, beds, or medical care. For days, families did not know whether their relatives had survived the bombing.
Executions under cover of war
The clearest measure of the crackdown is the gallows. Amnesty International recorded at least 2,159 executions in Iran in 2025 — and noted that the pace accelerated sharply after the Twelve-Day War. UN experts warned in October 2025 of "escalating repression and record executions" following the June attacks. (OHCHR)
In the war's first days, the judiciary moved fast against people accused of spying for Israel. Esmaeil Fekri was hanged on 16 June 2025, two days after the fighting began. Others — including the Kurdish men Edris Ali, Azad Shojaei, and Rasoul Ahmad Rasoul — were executed on espionage allegations that prosecutors backed with no credible public evidence. (TIME)
The executions then widened to protesters. By the spring of 2026, the Center for Human Rights in Iran documented at least 22 political prisoners hanged in six weeks — roughly one every two days — after secret proceedings marked by torture and forced confessions. Among the first was Saleh Mohammadi, a 19-year-old wrestler sentenced to death less than three weeks after his arrest. (CHRI)
Amnesty International reports that at least 78 protesters and dissidents are now under sentence of death and at risk of execution — including people who were children at the time of the alleged offense. (Amnesty)
Confessions extracted in the dark
Across these cases, rights organizations describe the same machinery: arrest without warrant, disappearance into solitary confinement, torture to extract a "confession," a closed trial without meaningful defense, and a sentence handed down in days. The methods documented since the war include beatings, electric shocks, mock executions, suspension by the hands and feet, prolonged solitary confinement, and the denial of food and medical care. (Amnesty International USA)
Arbitrary detention
Arrests without warrants, in home raids and at checkpoints, of journalists, lawyers, students, and social-media users.
Enforced disappearance
Detainees held incommunicado in undisclosed sites, with families denied any word of their fate.
Torture
Beatings, electric shocks, mock executions, and suspension used to coerce confessions.
Sham trials
Closed, days-long proceedings without counsel, ending in death sentences built on coerced "confessions."
Wartime "espionage" charges
A fast-tracked law making alleged cooperation with Israel automatically punishable by death.
Denial of care
Food, hygiene, and medical treatment withheld — conditions worsened by forced transfers after the Evin strike.
Names, not statistics
Behind every figure is a person with a name, a family, and a story the state has tried to erase. A few of the documented cases:
Ahmadreza Djalali
Disaster-medicine academic · Swedish–Iranian
Arbitrarily detained since 2016 and held in Evin, his death sentence on "espionage" charges has been repeatedly upheld. He has spent years at imminent risk of execution.
At risk of executionSaleh Mohammadi
Wrestler, age 19
Sentenced to death by a Qom court less than three weeks after his arrest, over the alleged killing of a security agent during protests — a charge he denied. He was among the first protesters of the January 2026 uprising to be hanged.
Executed, 2026Esmaeil Fekri
Accused of espionage for Israel
Executed on 16 June 2025 — two days after the war began — in one of the first wartime hangings on espionage allegations that rights groups say were never backed by credible evidence.
Executed, 2025Edris Ali, Azad Shojaei & Rasoul Ahmad Rasoul
Kurdish men
Executed on espionage allegations tied to the 2020 assassination of nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, after proceedings condemned by rights groups as grossly unfair.
Executed, 2025How this briefing was assembled
About this page. NPPC did not conduct the field investigations described here. This briefing compiles and cites the published findings of established human rights organizations, UN bodies, and credible news reporting, current to May 2026. Figures change as monitors update their counts; where accounts are presented as representative, they are drawn from that published documentation and labeled as such.
Reports of conditions inside Iranian prisons are necessarily incomplete: the state restricts access, holds many detainees incommunicado, and prosecutes those who speak out. The true scale is likely greater than any figure here.
- Amnesty International — Growing fears over torture and executions of those accused of "espionage" for IsraelJune 2025
- Amnesty International — Israeli attack on Evin prison must be investigated as a war crimeJuly 2025
- Amnesty International — Iran: Protesters and dissidents at risk of execution2026
- Human Rights Watch — Israeli attack on Evin prison an apparent war crimeAugust 2025
- Human Rights Watch — Iran: Tsunami of arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearancesFebruary 2026
- OHCHR — UN expert warns of escalating repression and record executions after June attacksOctober 2025
- Center for Human Rights in Iran — Iran's execution machine: political hangings surgeApril 2026
- Iran Human Rights Monitor — Forced transfer of political prisoners from EvinJune 2025
- NPR — Iran steps up executions of prisoners under cover of warMay 2026
Their names should outlast their cells.
Political prisoners are most in danger when the world stops watching. Documentation, naming, and sustained pressure save lives.