Iran International
The Iranian and Israeli people are natural allies against Iran's Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), and the fight against the force will be won in public opinion as much as on the battlefield, according to Arab-Israeli activist Yoseph Haddad.
“The Iranian people and the Israeli people, we love each other, we support each other,” Haddad said in Iran International’s Washington studio. “Every place I went for a demonstration, for a protest, I had Iranians at my back helping me.”
Haddad, a Christian from Nazareth and a volunteer Israeli army veteran, is one of Israel’s best-known advocates abroad. He ran second on Amcha Yisrael, a new right-wing list led by retired Brigadier General Ofer Winter, in Israel’s October 27 election. The list won 1.68 percent of the vote and no seats.
Haddad said he wanted to turn the ties between ordinary Israelis and Iranians into a common campaign.
“My plan is to take that relationship between the Israeli people and the Iranian people and strengthen it, and with the numbers, together we serve the same mission, which is one: destroying the IRGC and bringing security to Israel and the entire Middle East,” he said.
Israel has fought on what Haddad called seven fronts since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, including direct war with the Islamic Republic. In his view, Israel won militarily but stopped short of finishing the job, and the reason was the battle for public opinion.
“You know why we were stopped? Because of the public diplomacy and anti-Israel propaganda,” he said. “The way to fight the IRGC and to destroy the IRGC is through public diplomacy.”
He said Israel’s own government had fallen short. “We could have done more for Israeli public diplomacy. We could have done more for the Iranian people’s public diplomacy, and especially for the Iranian people against the IRGC,” he said.
He accused Qatar, which has hosted Hamas’s political office and funds Al Jazeera, of dominating that arena. “We completely gave that arena to Qatar, and they are shifting the narrative,” he said.
Haddad served in the Golani Brigade and was badly wounded by a Hezbollah anti-tank missile in the 2006 Lebanon war. “It was my Jewish brothers in arms who saved my life and who brought me back to Israel,” he said.
Arab citizens, about a fifth of Israel’s population, are exempt from compulsory service, and Haddad volunteered.
“I, as an Arab, was a commander over Jewish soldiers in the IDF,” he said, rejecting the charge that Israel is an apartheid state.
In 2024 he lit a torch at Israel’s official Independence Day ceremony. “This is something huge for an Israeli, yes, but for an Arab Israeli, it’s absolutely crazy,” he said.
Arab-led parties won a record 19 seats in the October 27 election, and their backing helped opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot win the mandate to form a government. Haddad said the result showed Israel’s democracy works, but he accused the parties’ leaders of neglecting their own voters.
“When the election comes, all the leaders stop talking about Gaza, stop talking about Jenin and Ramallah, and finally they start talking again about Nazareth and Haifa,” he said. “They’re lying to us, time after time.”
He singled out Ahmad Tibi, the veteran head of Ta’al. “He tells you that Israel is an apartheid state. He tells you that he doesn’t want Israel as a Jewish state,”
He also said Tibi was protected by his parliamentary immunity. “He hit a cop, but because he’s a politician, he has immunity. No one can do anything to him,” Haddad said.
Haddad said he had once been kept out of a Knesset committee session chaired by Joint List lawmaker Aida Touma-Sliman on the claim that Israel is an apartheid state.
“I told her, ‘You guys are actually the apartheid, because you don’t want to listen to me, and I’m one of you, an Arab just like you,’” he said. “Pure apartheid toward me.”
He also cited Sami Abu Shehadeh, head of the Balad party, who withdrew from the election in October after the Central Elections Committee voted to bar him over remarks after the October 7 attack.
“They don’t want to set a precedent,” Haddad said of the Supreme Court, which recommended the withdrawal rather than ruling. “I’m all for freedom of speech, until you start to incite to terrorism.”
Haddad said the Guards’ proxies indoctrinate children from an early age, and that education can work in both directions. He praised the United Arab Emirates, which designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group in 2014 and later began teaching the Holocaust in schools.
Of children raised by Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, he said: “When you arrive at age 12, you’re already serving in their terrorist organization, completely brainwashed. When you arrive at age 16, you’re ready to die.”
Haddad said he hoped Israelis and Iranians would build a common front.
"Together, the people of Israel and the people of Iran, we can actually do it," he said.
The Islamic Republic will keep pursuing a nuclear weapon as long as it remains in power, and Washington should keep up military, economic and covert pressure even while it talks to Tehran, Roger Zakheim, director of the Ronald Reagan Institute, told Iran International.
Speaking on Veterans Day, Zakheim said President Donald Trump had set “the first principle” right by vowing to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, a promise he said Trump had made more than 90 times.
“My own view is that as long as this regime is in place, it will pursue a nuclear weapon,” he said. “So if he’s going to prevent the nuclear program, the regime will have to change as well.”
The interview came as Qatar stepped up its mediation. Its foreign ministry said on Tuesday that talks had made progress and that both sides had spoken positively about a diplomatic solution, a day after Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, met Trump at the White House. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, called reports of negotiations or a meeting in Qatar “a pure lie.”
Zakheim, author of a new book on Reagan’s doctrine of peace through strength, said he had no objection to diplomacy, pointing to Reagan’s talks with Mikhail Gorbachev, as long as the pressure continues.
“I’m fine with talks to probe, to explore, to push, as long as we’re squeezing them at the same time: the blockade, the covert operation, the military presence, the ability to carry out a military operation at any moment,” he said. “If it’s diplomacy and everything else stops, I’d be very concerned.”
The US naval blockade of Iranian ports, first imposed in April, remains in place alongside a Treasury sanctions campaign the administration calls Economic Fury. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Paris on Tuesday that the economic campaign was “so devastating that right now there is no need for major combat operations.”
Zakheim called the memorandum of understanding reached in June “a very flawed agreement.” Any new deal would need verification involving the United States, “not some third party we can’t trust or don’t know,” he said, and should be “ripped up” if Iran failed to comply.
The June 17 memorandum declared an end to military operations and set a 60-day window for a final deal on Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions. It soon unraveled over control of the Strait of Hormuz, and the deadline passed in August without an agreement.
“They’re just talking about talking,” Zakheim said.
Zakheim gave Trump high marks for Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, and for Operation Epic Fury, the US-Israeli campaign launched on February 28 that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“The decapitation, the attacks on the nuclear sites, taking out both the ballistic and cruise missile sites, has made this regime weaker,” he said.
But voters had soured on the war, he said, because the president “didn’t win decisively and got stuck in 140 days of diplomacy with a regime that will never compromise.”
He said he hoped a “very consequential covert program” was under way, with Washington backing those who want to replace the Islamic Republic. “We’ve never had an opportunity like the one we have right now to support the people in Iran who are freedom-loving,” he said, adding that Iran’s borders were “more porous than ever” and its skies open.
“It’s an unnatural regime that oppresses its people,” he said.
Iran executed at least 691 people in the first ten months of 2026, including 36 protesters, according to Norway-based Iran Human Rights, which recorded at least 77 executions in October alone.
No one was calling for US troops on the ground, Zakheim said, but Washington must be ready to strike again if Tehran rebuilds its nuclear or ballistic missile programs.
“After Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury, I felt it was the beginning of the end of this regime, and I still stand by that,” he said.
Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in the November 3 midterm elections, with anger over the war’s part in pushing up the cost of living helping drive the result, according to Reuters. They also plan to cut Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget request, Military.com reported. Zakheim said the president was right to seek it.
The Constitution gives the president, as commander in chief, authority over military and foreign affairs that Congress does not share, Zakheim said, and presidents often turn to foreign policy after midterm losses “because it’s the one thing they can control.” Congress holds the power to declare war and to fund the military.
He warned against a “new generation of détente advocates” and what he called “full-on declinists,” some of whom won seats in the midterms.
“They believe that if only America would retreat from the world and leave, the Iranians would be just fine,” he said. “There’s no evidence of that in the history since 1979.”
He traced Washington’s experience with the Islamic Republic to the 444-day hostage crisis, which ended as Reagan was sworn in in January 1981, and the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, which he described as America’s first encounter with Hezbollah.
“You don’t have to look far back to find the number of times this regime has murdered Americans,” he said
France is investigating a cyberattack on freezers that store blood for hospital patients, its national blood service told Iran International, weeks after Paris blamed Iran’s Revolutionary Guards for hacking the freezers of hundreds of French supermarkets.
The service, the Établissement français du sang (EFS), said in a written reply that a judicial investigation was under way and that it could not comment on it or give details.
The attack took place on the night of November 1 to 2. Hackers took over the control systems of cold rooms at three regional centers and changed their temperature and defrost settings, the EFS said earlier.
Some units were reset from about minus 30 degrees Celsius to 110 degrees, the French weekly Le Canard enchaîné reported. That was the setting, not the temperature the blood products reached.
Alarms and an on-call technician caught the problem, and the products were moved to other sites or otherwise secured, the EFS said. No samples or blood products were lost. The service has not said when the attack was detected, how long the transfer took, or how the stocks were moved.
The attack came the same night that supermarkets in at least nine European countries, including Belgium and Luxembourg, reported suspected cyberattacks that sent fridge and freezer temperatures soaring.
The Paris prosecutor’s office has not yet linked the attack on the blood service to the supermarket cases and said its investigation is continuing, Agence France-Presse reported.
On October 11 and 12, hackers took control of refrigeration systems at about 700 supermarkets and other businesses across France, letting fridges and freezers warm up. Some stores had to throw out their entire stock of fresh and frozen food, and officials said the attacks caused heavy losses and, at some sites, fires.
A joint report by French intelligence and cybersecurity agencies named Shahid Kaveh, an offensive cyber unit of the Revolutionary Guards, as responsible, and said it worked behind front groups posing as independent hacker collectives. Paris prosecutors have requested international arrest warrants for suspects.
Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot summoned Iran’s ambassador and said France would seek European Union sanctions against those responsible. France was weighing further measures, he said, including some it might never make public.
US forces shot down two drones Iran’s Revolutionary Guards launched toward Bahrain on Friday and nothing was damaged, the US military said, rejecting the Guards’ claim that they had destroyed a US early-warning radar on the island.
“The IRGC launched two one-way attack drones toward Bahrain and both were shot down by US forces. There were no injuries or damage,” US Central Command said on X.
Hours earlier, the Guards had said their aerospace force “targeted and destroyed the American aggressors’ early-warning radar on the island of Bahrain,” in a statement carried by the Guards-affiliated Fars news agency. Bahrain hosts the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
The Guards said the attack was retaliation for what they called “the enemy’s aerial aggression against a telecommunications tower in Sirik,” a coastal town in Hormozgan province, on the Gulf of Oman east of the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian state media said Sirik had been struck on Thursday but did not say by whom.
The statement called the attack “a serious warning” to stop what the Guards described as aerial provocations and oil smuggling in the Strait of Hormuz.
“If violations and acts of aggression are repeated, the IRGC Aerospace Force is on full alert for an unrestricted response,” it said. The Guards also threatened harsher measures against companies they accused of being “misled by the United States.”
The Guards’ commander, Ahmad Vahidi, warned on Friday that any attack on Iran would be answered with force.
“The smallest aggression will be answered with horrifying and painful blows,” he said at a funeral in Tehran for 110 unidentified soldiers killed in the 1980s war with Iraq, according to Tasnim. “The enemy should learn from the repeated defeats it has suffered; otherwise, greater lessons lie ahead.”
Vahidi also said revenge for the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “will be achieved.” He gave no details of when or how.
Mohammadreza Naghdi, a senior Guards adviser and former commander of the Basij militia, said revenge for Khamenei’s killing remained a public demand and that the matter would not be closed without it.
“The public demand for revenge is not new,” he said, adding that crowds at pro-government rallies had chanted for revenge every night for the past 257 nights.
The exchange comes as US President Donald Trump holds off on new strikes after appeals from regional states, while keeping the naval blockade of Iranian ports in place.
Iran’s top security official, Mohsen Rezaei, said this week that Iran would strike US bases as far as Europe if attacked again.
Americans have repeatedly underestimated foreign efforts to influence their politics and public opinion, leaving the US vulnerable to campaigns by China, Russia and Iran, says Sean Durns, director of the Counter Extremism Research Center at the Capital Research Center.
Speaking at Iran International's Washington studio, Durns argued that influence operations and unconventional warfare are deeply embedded in the strategies of America's adversaries but remain poorly understood by much of the US public and political establishment.
"The American people are great people. They can be a bit naive," he said. Influence operations and hybrid warfare, he added, "have been ingrained into the DNA of the Chinese Communist Party since its founding, but they're very foreign to Americans."
Durns, a former deputy commentary editor at the Washington Examiner, leads a program launched last month by the conservative Capital Research Center to investigate extremist movements and foreign influence in the United States.
"These countries have a common enemy, and that is us," he said. "They do cooperate. They do collaborate, and we've seen that with the recent war, in fact, against Iran, where both China and Russia have given aid to Iran in its war against America."
A Ukrainian intelligence assessment reviewed by Reuters in April found that Russian satellites had carried out dozens of imagery surveys of military and critical sites across the Middle East to help Iran strike US forces and other targets.
In May, the Trump administration sanctioned several China-based firms it said had supplied satellite imagery that enabled Iranian strikes on US forces.
"The Chinese Communist Party views Iran as a foil, a way to tie down the United States,” Durns said, “so that it can continue to amass its power and challenge America for hegemony," he said.
Money and influence
Durns pointed to the network of Neville Roy Singham, an American-born former technology executive living in Shanghai, as an example of what he described as foreign influence reaching Western political movements.
Singham, who is married to Jodie Evans, a co-founder of the antiwar group Code Pink, has funded organisations that have attracted scrutiny over their promotion of Chinese government narratives.
In July, the House Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed three Singham-funded nonprofits—BreakThrough News, The People's Forum and Tricontinental—over approximately $40 million in funding linked to him.
Two of the organisations said the subpoenas violated the First Amendment. No charges have been filed.
Durns suggested that some demonstrations in Europe reflected organised influence campaigns rather than entirely spontaneous public mobilisation.
"It's important to understand, when the American public looks across the Atlantic and sees streets burning in Milan, Italy, or in Paris, France, or elsewhere, in Albania, in Spain, that these are not necessarily organic protests," he said.
Durns also accused such groups of exploiting the Gaza conflict to mobilise public anger.
"Gaza has been a very effective one for them, in which, of course, they use lies," he said. "They count on the public not being aware, not being educated."
He argued that social media platforms have made it easier for foreign influence campaigns to reach American audiences.
"There's no fact-checking on TikTok, and the algorithms are distorted to work on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party," he said.
Lessons from the Cold War
Durns said American complacency about foreign influence was not new, pointing to revelations about Soviet intelligence operations that emerged after the Cold War.
Among the examples he cited was the Mitrokhin Archive, a collection of notes compiled by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and smuggled to Britain in 1992, which exposed Soviet intelligence operations across the West.
"I have met a number of individuals in the press, or who are policymakers themselves, who have never heard of things like the Mitrokhin Archive," Durns said.
He suggested that a similar failure to understand the motivations of adversaries had shaped Washington's approach to the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution.
Successive American administrations, he argued, had repeatedly searched for moderate figures within Iran's leadership, misreading the nature of its political system.
"There are no moderates in the Iranian regime. The moderates have been expelled," he said. "They're in Evin prison, or they're elsewhere."
An enduring challenge
Durns rejected comparisons between the recent US war with Iran and the American experience in Vietnam, arguing that claims of an American defeat were misleading.
"There's been a very popular narrative, which is that America lost the current war against Iran, or that this war against Iran was like Vietnam," he said. "That is profoundly, profoundly false."
He also argued that Iran's economic weakness left Washington with substantial leverage despite Tehran's efforts to prolong the confrontation.
Durns compared the current mood in the United States to the 1970s, when America emerged from Vietnam amid widespread predictions of decline, only to prevail in the Cold War less than two decades later.
"So never count America out," he said. "But at the same time, the hour is getting late, and there are growing threats that have been massing over the course of many years that we need to confront and combat."
Baluch armed group Ansar al-Furqan has merged into the People’s Fighters Front, the coalition’s spokesman said, expanding an alliance that has claimed a series of attacks on Iranian security forces in the southeast in recent months.
Spokesman Mahmoud Baluch said the merger followed mediation by figures in Baluchestan and efforts by both organizations’ leaders to strengthen their campaign against the Islamic Republic.
“We the people of Iran, despite all our differences of thought and ideological disagreements, inhabit one land, share a common destiny and have been taken hostage by a criminal tyrant,” he said in a statement on Wednesday.
Baluch urged Iranians to overcome political divisions and unite to end the system of supreme clerical rule.
The front, known by its Persian initials JMM, was formed in December 2025, bringing together Jaish al-Adl, the PADA Baluch Movement, Harakat-e Nasr Baluchistan, the Mohammad Rasulullah group and independently organized Baluch fighters.
Its charter combines demands for Baluch rights with nationwide political objectives, advocating diplomatic, cultural and media activity alongside armed action.
The United States designated Jundallah a terrorist organization in 2010 and amended the designation in 2019 to include Jaish al-Adl.
Ansar al-Furqan is not designated as a terrorist organization by the United States or the European Union but is blacklisted by Iran, Pakistan and China.
The Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium has reported alleged links between the group and al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra Front, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and Jaish al-Adl.
Ansar al-Furqan took responsibility for several attacks on Iran’s police and military, including a 2018 Chabahar suicide bombing which killed two policemen. However, the attacks have not remained limited to the restive southeast.
In 2017, Ansar Al-Furqan claimed responsibility for bombing an oil pipeline in Ahvaz, a city located in Iran's southwestern Khuzestan province.
Continued JMM attacks
The People’s Fighters Front claimed responsibility for three attacks in Golshan, Konarak and Saravan on November 2–3, targeting what it described as Revolutionary Guards personnel, Afghan Fatemiyoun fighters and a police special unit commander.
Local rights group Haalvsh reported that at least seven members of the IRGC-affiliated Fatemiyoun brigade were killed in the Konarak attack on a school allegedly being used as a military base.
The IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency gave a different account, saying militants attacked army personnel and one assailant was killed. It reported no deaths among the targeted personnel.
On November 7, Iran executed Mohammad Aref Shahbakhsh over an attack on a police post in Khash, the judiciary said. It alleged links to Jaish al-Adl but provided no date for the attack or details of his trial.
US-based rights group HRANA previously documented 63 armed incidents across southeastern Iran between March 31 and October 10, leaving at least 94 dead and 33 wounded. Most incidents remained unattributed or could not reliably be linked to a particular group.
Analysts interviewed by Iran International in October said closer coordination had helped militants intensify attacks, but cautioned that broader national support remained uncertain.
The predominantly Sunni Baluch population has long faced economic deprivation, ethnic and religious discrimination, and repression.
