On Wednesday, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) announced that it had arrested three individuals on charges of spying for the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. The identity of the persons in question or the evidence that led to allegations against them were not revealed.
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The Iranian regime has also a long history of using charges such as espionage and “collaborating with hostile states” to justify harsh sentences for political detainees. This impulse has accelerated in recent weeks as Tehran has been trying to expand its regional meddling as a hedge against the likely collapse of its 2015 nuclear agreement with the United States and five other world powers.
Opposition to Israel’s very existence has always been a central focus of the clerical regime's appeals for "Muslim unity," but this has faced newfound challenges since 2019 when a number of regional countries including Iran’s chief rival Saudi Arabia moved to normalize relations with Israel. Tehran has repeatedly condemned such efforts and has sought to leverage them against pre-existing relationships among other Arab and Muslim nations.
On Saturday, following clashes between Israeli authorities and Palestinian worshipers at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh tweeted a reminder that “normalization with the apartheid regime of Israel only encourages the oppressor to double down on its brutality,” and declared that “Muslims must stand united behind the Palestinian cause.”
Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian recently talked to an official from the terrorist group Hamas, implying imminent support for new attacks. In that conversation, he reportedly described Israel as “too weak” to resist attacks. Other components of that movement include Iran’s foremost regional militant proxy, Hezbollah, which is headquartered in Lebanon but has joined the regime's own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in conflicts in Syria and elsewhere.
The regime has always tried to exploit the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for its own ends, and the Palestinian people have dismissed Tehran's self-serving attempts as a major obstacle to realizing their legitimate demands.
Recently, the Iranian regime celebrated its National Armed Forces Day, featuring military parades that showed off a range of missiles and drones, many of which are reportedly capable of reaching Israel. To further mark that occasion, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi delivered a televised speech on Monday in which he declared that Iranian forces would strike at the “heart” of the Jewish state if it made “the slightest move” against the theocracy.
In March, the IRGC fired a volley of missiles into Iraqi Kurdistan and later claimed to have been targeting a compound used for Mossad training. The strike was initially reported to be an act of revenge for an Israeli operation in Syria that killed two IRGC officers. However, subsequent reports cited sources inside the Iranian regime in order to argue that it was more closely linked to outrage over a proposed pipeline that would allow energy products from the Kurdish region to more effectively compete against Iranian alternatives. No evidence was ever presented to substantiate claims of substantial Mossad influence in that region, and Kurdish authorities fiercely denied the implication that any such presence had been permitted.
Persistent questions over the March missile strike are likely to influence similar questions regarding Iran’s narrative about recent arrests. Until more is known about the supposed Mossad agents whose arrest was announced on Wednesday, the Iranian regime’s critics are sure to presume that in fact the arrests were politically motivated and the resulting allegations were little more than another political stunt aimed at promoting unity among fundamentalist extremists.
Since not even the nationality of the detainees has been publicly revealed, there also exists the possibility that this will turn out to be another instance of regime authorities taking foreign citizens and dual nationals hostage and charging them with national security crimes as part of an effort to use them as bargaining chips in negotiations with Western governments.
Although two British nationals were released last month in exchange for repayment of a decades-old debt, at least a dozen other British, European, and American nationals remain in detention or unable to leave Iran. One permanent resident of the US, 59-year-old Shahab Dalali, only had his case revealed publicly on April 5, after his wife gave an interview in which she emphasized the need for “all the hostages” to be released.
Nahid Dalali noted that her husband had been accused of “aiding and abetting” the US after relocating to that country and then returning to Iran in order to attend his father’s funeral. The threat of arrest frequently looms over such family visits when the visitor holds citizenship or permanent residency in the US, Britain, or any other Western country. The recently-released Iranian-British dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been traveling with her two-year-old daughter on a visit to her Iranian parents before she was arrested, accused of being “one of the leaders” of an amorphous “infiltration network,” and sentenced to five years in Evin Prison.
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