Iran Says US Sent Many Messages Regarding Containing Gaza War
Iran received many messages from the United States in the past six weeks of regional conflict, foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told Qatar’s Al Jazeera television.
Iran received many messages from the United States in the past six weeks of regional conflict, foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told Qatar’s Al Jazeera television.
“Americans always emphasized in their messages that they are not after expanding the war. We responded that although you say you are not after expanding the war, but by standing with the Israeli regime and supplying large quantities of weapons and equipment from American bases in the region, you have practically expanded the conflict,” Amir-Abdollahian said. The messages were delivered through the Swiss embassy in Tehran, he said.
The United States deployed two powerful naval strike groups to the region soon after Israel began its attacks on Gaza, after Hamas’ terror attack on October 7. They deployment was seen as deterrence to Iran and its most powerful proxy force, the Lebanese Hezbollah.
Iran avoided direct military involvement in the Gaza war, but its proxy forces launched attacks against US bases in the region and against Israel.
Amir-Abdollahian referred to these attacks in his interview, as “the natural reaction of resistance forces in the region.” He then went on arguing that militant groups in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere in the region are genuine anti-US and anti-Israeli popular forces, failing to mention that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard spent vast sums of money to create these groups and support them.
Although the US retaliated several times against the more than 70 attacks on US forces in past weeks, critics argue that deterrence against Iran has failed and Washington needs to target the Revolutionary Guard directly to prevent more attacks.
The Women's Revolution, a coalition of rights activists advocating for social and economic equality, modernism, and the separation of religion and state, highlighted the roots of women's rights violations in the laws and governance of the Islamic Republic.
These violations include granting men the right to divorce and child custody, obliging women to provide marital relations on demand, endorsing child marriage, imposing death sentences on women for extramarital relationships, idealizing traditional gender roles, restricting women's entry to stadiums, and imposing limitations on their education and professions.
“We, the signatories of this statement, know very well that women will never be freed from violence and this cycle of sexism will continue given the domination of a gender apartheid system. But we believe that the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution has sparked the hope in everyone's hearts that the end of this tragedy is conceivable,” the statement said.
In a statement which it published on Facebook, the banned Iranian Writers’ Association (Kanoon-e Nevisandegan-e Iran), also said violation of women’s rights in the Islamic Republic is “systematic”.
The Writers’ Association said in their statement that imposing hijab on Iranian women by the Islamic government after the 1979 revolution was a first step that was quickly followed to embrace many other areas of their lives including laws, family, work, and education. These, the statement said, revealed themselves in deepening of women’s oppression and revealed themselves as domestic violence, child marriage, and honor killings, and other forms of violence such as acid attacks.
“This misogyny revealed its ultimate barbarism against the movement that began with the Woman, Life, Freedom slogan,” the statement said and warned that the “dominance of reactionary cultural and religious elements” has elevated violence against women and their oppression to “disastrous new dimensions”.
Many allege that the Islamic Republic has given free rein to reactionary religious groups for violence against women such as mass poisoning of female students that began in November last year and continued for several months.
Authorities denied any responsibility or involvement in the attacks that affected hundreds of schools and thousands of girls across the country for months but did not take action to find and arrest those behind the attacks.
Authorities have also stepped-up pressure on women’s rights activists who are increasingly being arrested on various pretexts and heavily sentenced in unfair trials to silence them. Women’s rights activists are also increasingly being subjected to violence in prisons.
In a letter from Evin Prison in August, Narges Mohammadi who won the Nobel Peace Prize in November warned about escalating systematic violence against female prisoners and revealed disturbing details of physical harassment, abuse, and assault inflicted on women inmates in the months leading up to the anniversary of the nationwide Woman, Life, Freedom protests.
In a resolution adopted Thursday, the European Parliament strongly condemned the latest attacks against women, girls, and women's rights defenders in Iran and called on the Iranian leadership to immediately stop the systemic oppression and all discrimination against women and girls, including mandatory veiling, and to withdraw all gender discriminatory laws.
