The Iran war’s most invisible human cost is happening inside Iran’s prisons, not in the Strait of Hormuz. While the world’s media attention is focused on diplomatic proposals, oil prices, and carrier strike groups, the Islamic Republic is executing people at a pace that human rights organisations describe as unprecedented in its recent history.
What CNN Reported
Since the war in Iran began, the country has been carrying out the fastest wave of political executions in its recent history, with at least 28 people who have been put to death on political, protest-related, or espionage charges, according to a US-based human rights group. CNN’s Clarissa Ward reports.
Twenty-eight people. In seven weeks. On political, protest-related, or espionage charges. That is an average of four per week — a pace that human rights monitors describe as the fastest sustained rate of politically motivated executions Iran has carried out in decades.
Who Is Being Executed
Iran’s political execution record since February 28 encompasses three distinct categories of prisoners. The first is political prisoners — individuals who had been arrested during the 2022-2023 Mahsa Amini protests and during subsequent waves of anti-government demonstrations, held in pre-trial detention or serving sentences, and now being executed in accelerated proceedings during the war’s domestic security emergency.
The second category is people charged with espionage — a charge that carries the death penalty in Iran and that has been applied with particular frequency since the war began. The arrests of the two Israeli Air Force technicians who were spying for Iran reflect the reverse side of the same security paranoia: Iran’s intelligence services are simultaneously hunting for spies within their own system and executing people accused of working for foreign intelligence services.
The third category is individuals charged with what Iranian law calls “moharebeh” — “enmity against God” — a catch-all charge that has historically been applied to opposition activists, religious minorities, and anyone the IRGC considers a domestic security threat.
Why the War Is Enabling the Executions
The war provides the Iranian government with two specific resources that enable an acceleration of political executions: a national security emergency that limits judicial due process, and a domestic narrative of existential threat that makes opposition to the government appear as collaboration with the enemy.
During the pre-war period, executions of political prisoners in Iran were constrained partly by international attention and partly by the need to maintain some appearance of due process for Iran’s diplomatic relationships.
In wartime, with the country under foreign attack and international attention focused on oil prices and nuclear negotiations, those constraints are reduced. The pace of executions in the seven weeks since the war began exceeds, by a significant margin, the pace that Iran maintained during any comparable period in recent decades.
The Diplomatic Silence
None of the diplomatic proposals exchanged between Iran and the United States — not the 14-point plan, not the US 9-point demand, not the back-channel discussions that Trump has described as producing “Great Progress” — contain any provision related to Iran’s treatment of domestic political prisoners or its execution rate.
This is not an oversight: it reflects a strategic decision by both sides to keep the human rights question out of negotiations in order to make a deal more achievable on the issues both sides define as primary.
The 28 people executed in seven weeks will not appear in any peace agreement. Their deaths are the hidden cost of a diplomatic process that measures its progress in oil prices and nuclear enrichment timelines.
