A 50-year-old fitness trainer who joined a protest in Esfahan with her two children last month was shot in the head and later died after a hospital refused to admit her and security forces stopped the car carrying her, sources told Iran International.
Arezoo Abedi, a mountaineer and fitness coach, was shot on Baghe Daryacheh Street on January 8 while her children were with her, sources said.
Bystanders helped her children transport her to Saadi Hospital, but the facility declined to admit her, according to her family. They then headed toward Alzahra Hospital.
On the way, members of the Basij and other security forces stopped the vehicle and fired warning shots in an attempt to force the passengers out, sources said.
The family was eventually allowed to proceed, but Abedi died before reaching the hospital. Her body was transferred to Alzahra’s morgue.
Her family said authorities released the body after three days on the condition that no public funeral be held. She was buried at night under security presence at Bagh-e Rezvan cemetery beside her father’s grave.
The official forensic report listed the cause of death as “cardiac arrest.”
Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, spoke before the council in Geneva as most delegates remained seated, despite calls from campaigners urging democratic governments to walk out.
For many Iranians, the moment underscored what they see as a stark reality: while families continue to mourn the thousands killed in the protests, representatives of the same government accused of carrying out the violence were again granted an international platform at the world’s leading human rights body.
“Several UN Human Rights bodies have found that the Islamic Republic is committing crimes against humanity. The regime’s perpetrators should be punished rather than given a platform,” Brandon Silver, director of policy and projects at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, told Iran International.
Walkout campaign falls short
In the days leading up to the session, human rights advocates and Iranian activists urged democratic governments to leave the chamber during the speech.
In an interview conducted before Gharibabadi was set to speak, UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer called on governments to refuse participation, warning that granting Tehran a podium would send a devastating message to victims and their families.
“You cannot grant a false badge of international legitimacy to a regime that just murdered tens of thousands of its people,” Neuer told Eye for Iran, adding, “Shame on the UN for inviting the murderers who try to wound and kill innocent people.”
A global petition supporting the walkout effort gathered more than 360,000 signatures. But video from Monday’s session showed that most delegations remained in place as the Iranian official delivered his remarks.
Tehran’s narrative
During his speech, Gharibabadi dismissed reports of large-scale killings and instead accused the United States and Israel of orchestrating unrest inside Iran.
He claimed “enemies of Iran” had diverted economic protests into “riots and chaos,” alleging that demonstrators committed “Daesh-like atrocities,” while asserting official figures showed 3,117 total deaths — far below estimates reported by rights groups.
He further accused supporters of the protest movement abroad of spreading “fabricated casualty figures,” while insisting Iran itself was a defender of human rights.
The claims closely mirrored messaging that has circulated across state media and official channels since the crackdown.
A recent joint investigation by Iran International and The Free Press documented what it described as a coordinated international information campaign launched alongside the repression, blaming the domestic uprising on foreign conspiracies and amplifying those narratives through media personalities and social media networks.
Diplomacy over grief
For families of victims, the speech stood in sharp contrast to testimonies emerging from inside Iran.
One father told Eye for Iran that his 17-year-old son, wounded during demonstrations, was later killed inside a hospital while doctors were attempting to save him — one of many accounts shared by families seeking international recognition and accountability.
Activists say allowing such narratives to be delivered at the Human Rights Council risks amplifying disputed claims while survivors continue to demand justice.
Politics over principles
Later the same day in Geneva, Gharibabadi also appeared at the UN Conference on Disarmament, where images captured him greeting and shaking hands with UN Secretary-General António Guterres following the session.
For critics, the optics reinforced what they see as a rapid return to diplomatic normalcy despite the recent crackdown.
“The UN either stands for something or it doesn’t,” Hillel Neuer told Eye for Iran, arguing that international institutions cannot claim to defend human rights while granting legitimacy to officials accused of mass repression.
For many Iranians watching from inside the country and across the diaspora, the sequence—a speech at the Human Rights Council followed by diplomatic handshakes—symbolized the uneasy coexistence of international diplomacy and unresolved domestic trauma.
The protest movement in Iran is no longer selectively targeting certain symbols of the Islamic Republic, as it did a decade ago. It is now challenging everything the Islamic Republic represents, including the national flag itself.
One of the earliest visible signs of this state–society rupture emerged in 2009, when students set fire to a picture of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the 1979 revolution. At the time, the act carried such a strong taboo that opposition leaders suggested it may have been carried out by elements linked to the security apparatus, to justify a harsher crackdown.
Around the same period, protesters began chanting, “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon — my life for Iran,” signaling a shift from the Islamic Republic’s transnational ideology to a national identity.
The Islamic Republic used such displays of anger in state television propaganda to discredit protesters. Yet each time, segments of the public repeated those same acts, turning them into a new front of defiance against the state.
The display of anger soon expanded to other figures — including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and senior military figures such as Qassem Soleimani, who had embodied Iran’s extraterritorial revolutionary doctrine. Their posters were torn down and burned.
Public anger even targeted the Iranian national football team during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, which many Iranians viewed not as a sporting body but as a representative of the Islamic Republic.
For many Iranians, the team’s international presence risked strengthening the state’s domestic legitimacy and global image at a time when large segments of society felt alienated from it.
The depth of the rupture became particularly visible in June 2025, when many Iranians celebrated the killing of senior Iranian military commanders by Israel. Military figures who had been presented as national heroes four decades earlier during the war with Iraq were no longer seen as representing the nation.
Burning the flag
Students at several universities across Iran held protest gatherings for the third consecutive day on Monday, chanting slogans against Khamenei and in support of opposition figure exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi.
During their gatherings, they trampled on the flag of the Islamic Republic and threw it toward members of the security forces. At Amir Kabir University, the University of Tehran, and Alzahra University, students set fire to the flag of the Islamic Republic.
The Islamic Republic tried in 1979 to combine national and Islamic elements in the national flag. It took the colors from the pre-revolutionary flag and added the phrase “Allahu Akbar” in the middle. This is the part that many Iranians no longer sympathize with.
Iranian law does not explicitly criminalize insulting the national flag, but it can be prosecuted since the flag bears the word “Allah,” and insulting Islamic sanctities can carry severe penalties.
Islamic Republic vs. Iran
The Islamic Republic, from the very beginning, showed little regard for many Iranian traditions and symbols. Khomeini and his allies attempted to replace Nowruz new year celebration with Islamic religious holidays, although they failed.
While the White House displays a Nowruz table with traditional symbols, Khamenei delivers his New Year speeches without a Nowruz table, with only a photo of Khomeini in the background.
For many years after the revolution, the national flag did not occupy a central place in the Islamic Republic’s public symbolism.
That changed during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when the display of flags expanded dramatically. Streets were lined with newly produced, brightly colored flags, and government buildings were draped in national symbols.
This was not merely aesthetic. It coincided with the intensification of the nuclear dispute and a deliberate effort to frame Iran’s nuclear program as a matter of national sovereignty rather than regime ideology.
After the 12-day war with Israel in June, the Islamic Republic made an attempt to revive some of the national symbols and motifs. At one point, after emerging from his war bunker, Khamenei asked a religious singer to perform a song about Iran. But many Iranians saw that as too little, too late.
The resentment between segments of society and the state — and anything associated with it — has intensified to such a degree that long-standing religious funeral traditions have begun to fade. The customary recitation of the Quran at funeral ceremonies has been largely replaced by music, and mourners have even danced at the funerals of victims killed during the January protests.
In certain instances, people have worn white instead of black, returning not to pre-revolutionary but pre-Islamic traditions.
