By Al-Fassel and AFP | 2023-11-01

The United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Iran said Tuesday (October 31) that the Israel-Hamas war has emboldened "repression" inside the country, whose ruling clerics have championed the Palestinian militants.

Javaid Rehman, a human rights expert given a mandate from the Human Rights Council in Geneva, said that the Islamic republic was responding to a loss of credibility after mass protests set off by the September 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian woman detained by police for failing to obey the strict public dress code.

"They were already planning further repression," Rehman said at a Washington roundtable hosted by the National Union for Democracy in Iran, an advocacy group.

"In terms of the current crisis, they feel even more emboldened because they believe that they have deflected internal criticism, and the internal repression, through becoming or claiming to become the cheerleaders... of the Palestinian movement," he said.

Iranian leaders have repeatedly issued warnings to Israel, with Yemen's Iranian-backed Houthi rebels claiming to have fired drones or ballistic missiles at the country in three separate operations, and Lebanon's Hizbullah firing missiles into Israel's north.

Attempting to control narrative

Since the war has begun, state-owned media have been plastered with officials' praise of Hamas militants, concern about Gaza, and anti-Israel rhetoric, drowning out any mention of the recent domestic events that the majority of the public and world observers continue to focus on.

The war started when Iran was overtaken by news of three major developments: the status of a teen who was beaten into a coma by a regime agent because she had not covered her hair, a prominent imprisoned activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize and the worsening state of Iran's economy.

The first several days after the fall and hospitalization of 16-year-old Armita Geravand -- who went into a coma October 1 -- the government kept the news under wraps, as it was clearly concerned about potential protests and a repeat of the events following Amini's death.

Geravand died on October 28.

She was severely injured October 1 on the Tehran subway in what activists described as an altercation with female police officers who apprehended her for failing to wear the obligatory Islamic headscarf.

This has been strongly denied by Iranian officials who insist she collapsed from low blood pressure and hurt herself.

Hardline media outlets ran editorials about the regime's innocence in the teen's plight for days, claiming that a plot they labeled "Project Armita" had failed to lead to protests.

Once the Iran-backed militant group Hamas attacked Israel, Iranian media flooded audiences with updates on the burgeoning crisis, pivoting completely away from content related to "Project Armita."

Meanwhile, the Iranian government has described the Nobel Committee's decision to award prominent jailed rights activist Narges Mohammadi this year's Peace Prize as "biased and political."

Regime-affiliated media quoted officials' descriptions of Mohammadi as an individual repeatedly "convicted" of crimes.

This inconvenient story for the regime has also disappeared amid state media's wall-to-wall coverage of the Hamas-Israel war.

Since president Ebrahim Raisi has taken office, regime-affiliated media have been covering the dire state of Iran's near-bankrupt economy more gently, with less criticism of the government.

Iran's economy has been on the brink of collapse, amid the free fall in the value of its national currency, sky-high inflation and increasing unemployment.

As soon as the war started between Israel and Hamas, domestic media began focusing on the needs of Palestinians and the dire conditions of Gaza inhabitants, and avoided delving into Iran's own economic issues.