Tehran has renamed a street honoring the assassin of former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat after slain Hezbollah leader, a move that both commemorates Hassan Nasrallah and eliminates a long-standing obstacle to improved ties with Egypt.
“Tehran, as the beating heart of the Islamic world, must reflect its identity in the city’s face,” said Mohammad Hassan Akhtari, head of the Committee to Support the Islamic Revolution of the Palestinian People.
“Naming a street after Hassan Nasrallah symbolizes Tehran’s bond with the resistance movement," he told reporters.
The street, located in District 6 in central Tehran, was initially named after Khalid Islambouli following Sadat’s assassination in 1981, angering the Cairo government for decades.
Egyptian officials had long viewed the gesture as a provocation and a major obstacle to normalization.
Iran hailed Islambouli as a “martyr of the resistance” for his role in killing the Egyptian leader who had signed a peace treaty with Israel.
The decision to rename it after Nasrallah comes less than a year after his death on 27 September 2024, when an Israeli airstrike destroyed Hezbollah’s underground headquarters in Beirut, killing the Iran-backed group’s long-time leader.
Thaw after 45 years
Tehran's decision to change the controversial street name comes more than a month after the Iranian foreign minister’s visit to Cairo, signaling progress toward healing one of the region's deepest rifts, which has lingered from the 1979 Revolution in Iran and Egypt's peace treaty with Israel.
Relations between the Sunni Muslim heavyweight and the Shi'ite theocracy has been in a deep freeze ever since.
Following Araghchi’s June 2 meeting with Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the top Iranian official himself wrote in an Arabic post on X that diplomacy between Iran and Egypt had entered a new phase.
Egypt is a close US ally and maintains official relations with Israel. For Iran, mending the 45-year rift with Egypt could signal a softening of its revolutionary-era, anti-American posture.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini famously called for the Egyptian people to rise up and overthrow Anwar Sadat after he normalized ties with Israel.
