Iran Hangs Three Over Protests, Calls It Counter-Espionage

Hassan Divband, Hamid Kazemi and Reza Zanganeh are dead. Iran's judiciary announced their executions on Sunday, November 8, 2026, after the Supreme Court upheld the death sentences. The charge: operational activities for Israel, the United States and hostile groups against national security. The penalty added the confiscation of their property, so the state took the men and then took what they owned.

The judiciary's story runs like this. On January 8 and 9, in Karaj, west of Tehran, the three attacked government buildings, destroyed surveillance cameras and damaged an electrical substation, knocking out power in parts of the city. Authorities said the group had firearms, knives, Molotov cocktails and homemade explosive devices, and had assaulted two people they believed to be security personnel. State-affiliated Tasnim News Agency said investigators recovered two hunting rifles, ammunition, and evidence of 20 Molotov cocktails and 15 homemade explosive devices. The judiciary said confessions, surveillance footage and intelligence reports backed the convictions. That evidence has not been independently examined. Everything the public knows about the case comes from the institution that did the killing.

The State's Monopoly

State media said the men acted on calls for demonstrations by exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi and as part of an Israeli-American plan to destabilize the country. Notice the structure: a protest becomes a foreign plot, a foreign plot becomes espionage, and espionage becomes a capital offense. Every rung of that ladder is climbed inside a Revolutionary Court.

HRANA reported two days before the executions that Divband and Kazemi had been sentenced to death by Branch 2 of the Karaj Revolutionary Court, presided over by Judge Sabzevari, under provisions on operational activities against national security. Two days from reported sentence to rope. The Supreme Court's review fit inside that window, or the timeline was compressed past the point of meaning.

Divband, 30, owned an automotive repair business. Authorities accused him of organizing attacks, recruiting employees and relatives, and encouraging others to destroy public property. His family got pulled in too. IranWire, citing an Iranian committee monitoring the detention of protesters, reported the arrests of 29-year-old relative Ali-Asghar Divband, 15-year-old Ali-Akbar Divband, his 50-year-old father Mohammad-Ali Divband, and 20-year-old relative Hamidreza Forouhar. Their circumstances remain unclear. A 15-year-old is in that list. Nobody outside the apparatus knows where he is.

Zanganeh, 27, a recently married technician specializing in foreign vehicles, was arrested at his workplace in April and held at Ghezel Hesar Prison, according to Hengaw Organization for Human Rights. The charge was cooperating with Israel's Mossad. People close to him rejected the espionage allegations. The judiciary said eight other defendants in the Karaj case got prison terms of five to ten years.

Who Gets Crushed

This wasn't a one-off. Legislation introduced in 2025 raised punishments for espionage and cooperation with Israel and other countries designated hostile, accelerated after the Twelve Day War in June 2025. Human Rights Watch and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran warned in September the law was being used against protesters. They examined 29 executions linked to the January protests between March and August. In 16 of them, no one alleged the defendants had killed anyone.

"The authorities' message is clearly that protests will be met with brutality," said Bahar Saba, senior Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch.

An October Iran International investigation found at least 70 executions in political and security cases between January 7 and October 5, 35 of them tied to the January protests. It counted 194 people facing death sentences, 113 arrested in connection with the protests. Iran Human Rights, based in Norway, reported on November 3 at least 691 executions across all categories in the first ten months of 2026, including 77 in October.

Who Benefits

The demonstrations began in late December 2025, about 11 months ago. Since then the state has answered street anger with scaffolds and a statute. A war with Israel handed the Islamic Republic a ready-made vocabulary, and it now files protesters under it. Every crowd can be recast as a foreign operation, and every rope as counter-intelligence.

None of the outside players named in the judiciary's script, Israel, the United States, or an exiled prince angling for a return to power, has offered the people of Karaj anything but a role in someone else's story. The men in the Revolutionary Court and the men in the palaces-in-waiting want the same thing: a population that obeys. The people who stood in the streets of Karaj were never consulted by either.