Iranian protesters call for three-day strike starting Monday

Protesters in Iran on Sunday called for a three-day strike this week, stepping up pressure on authorities after the public prosecutor said the morals police, whose detention of a young woman sparked months of protests, had been ended.

There was no confirmation of the closure from the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of the morale police, and Iranian state media said public prosecutor Mohammad Jafar Montazeri was not responsible for overseeing the force.

Top Iranian officials have repeatedly said Tehran would not change the mandatory hijab of the Islamic Republic, which requires women to dress modestly and wear headscarves, despite 11 weeks of protests against strict Islamic regulations.

Hundreds of people were killed in the riots that erupted in September following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman who was detained by the morality police for flouting hijab rules.

Protesters seeking to uphold their defiance of Iran’s clerical rulers called for a three-day economic strike and demonstration in Tehran’s Azadi Square on Wednesday, according to individual posts shared on Twitter by accounts not verified by Reuters.

President Ebrahim Raisi is due to address students in Tehran on the same day to mark Iran Student Day.

Similar calls for a strike and mass mobilization have in recent weeks resulted in an escalation of unrest that has swept the country — some of the biggest anti-government protests since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Activist HRANA news agency said 470 protesters had been killed as of Saturday, including 64 minors. She added that 18,210 protesters were arrested and 61 members of the security forces were killed.

Iran’s interior ministry security council said on Saturday the death toll was 200, according to the judiciary’s Mizan news agency.

Residents posting on social media and newspapers such as the Shargh daily say there have been fewer sightings of the morale police on the streets in recent weeks as authorities apparently try to avoid provoking further protests.

On Saturday, Montazeri was quoted by Iran’s semi-official labor news agency as saying the moral police had been disbanded.

“The same authority that established this police has turned it off,” he said. He said the moral police were not under the authority of the judiciary, which “continues to monitor behavioral actions at the community level”.

State-run Al Alam television said foreign media were describing his comments as “a retreat by the Islamic Republic from its position on the hijab and religious morality as a result of the protests”, but that all that can be understood from his comments is that the moral police was not directly related to the judiciary.

Executions

State media said four men convicted of cooperating with the Israeli spy agency Mossad were executed on Sunday.

They were arrested in June — before the current unrest sweeping the country — following cooperation between the Ministry of Intelligence and the Revolutionary Guard, Tasnim news agency reported.

The Islamic Republic has long accused archenemy Israel of carrying out covert operations on its soil. Tehran recently accused Israeli and Western intelligence services of planning a civil war in Iran.

The prime minister’s office in Israel, which oversees the Mossad, declined to comment.

Iranian state media reported on Wednesday that the country’s Supreme Court upheld the death sentence handed down to the four men “for the crime of cooperation with the Zionist regime’s intelligence services and for kidnapping”.

Three other people were sentenced to prison terms of between five and 10 years after being convicted of crimes that included acting against national security, assisting in kidnapping and possessing illegal weapons, Mehr news agency said.