The Islamic Republic of Iran executed four individuals on Friday, December 29, who had been convicted of spying for Israel’s intelligence service, Mossad. The executions took place in Iran’s northwestern province of West Azerbaijan.
The Mizan online news agency, affiliated with Iran’s judiciary, reported on Friday that “four members of a sabotage team associated with the Zionist regime, who had committed extensive actions against the country’s security under the guidance of Mossad officers, were executed this morning following legal procedures.”
The new agency named the individuals as three men – Wafa Hanareh, Arman Omari, and Rahman Pahazo – and one woman, Nasim Namazi. They were all sentenced to death on charges of “moharebeh,” defined as waging war against God, and “corruption on Earth” through their “collaboration with the Zionist regime.”
In mid-December, Iran executed a man convicted of collaborating with Israel’s intelligence services in the southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchistan. According to Iranian media, He was found guilty of “collecting and providing classified information to the Mossad spy service with the aim of disrupting public order.”
In December 2022, the country hanged another group of four who had been convicted of collaborating with Israel’s intelligence services.
Iran accuses Israel of espionage on its soil in an effort to destabilize its security and dismantle its nuclear program infrastructures. Israel’s response to such allegations has been silence, neither denying nor confirming them.
The Islamic Republic previously accused Israel of conducting the airstrike in Syria on December 25, resulting in the death of Sayyed Razi Mousavi, a senior commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) responsible for logistical support to the Resistance Front in Syria.
Iranian officials and allied militant groups in the region vowed revenge. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said, “Undoubtedly, this action is another sign of frustration and weakness of the occupying Zionist regime in the region” He emphasized that the Israeli regime will certainly face consequences for this crime. In a social media post, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian also emphasized retaliation, stating, “Tel Aviv should wait for a tough countdown.”
In November 2020, Israel carried out an AI-assisted operation in Tehran, without any operative present on the ground, that killed deputy minister of defense Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was Iran’s top nuclear scientist. Before that, in 2018, Mossad operatives entered a warehouse in Tehran and retrieved the largest cache of the country’s nuclear secrets.
Minutes after the news of the execution broke out on Friday, Iran’s official news agency, IRNA, published an 8-minute-long video in which the convicts were confessing to collaborating with Mossad agents based in Turkey. They used two names, Tony and Arash.
According to Iran’s Tasnim news agency which is close to the country’s military establishment, the four individuals who were executed were part of a 10-person plot. It is not clear yet whether the rest of the group were or will be sentenced to death too.
Iranian news agencies reported that the men were arrested in May in a “neighboring country” after at least four months of being under surveillance by the country’s intelligence agencies. The neighboring country they referred to was most probably Turkey, where the convicts said they had communicated with Israeli operatives.
Turkey has become a battleground in recent years for Iran-Israel covert and shadow war. On December 19, Cypriot authorities said that in a joint operation with Israel’s Mossad, they had dismantled an Iranian plot to target Israeli businessmen. In June 2022, Turkish authorities announced that they had arrested five Iranians with military gear in Istanbul who wanted to kill Israeli citizens. This past June, Israel’s Mossad, which rarely speaks to the media, claimed that it had abducted from inside Iran a man named Yousef Shahabazi Abbasalilu, who the Israeli intelligence said was planning to target Israelis in Cyprus.
