Iran’s judiciary said Monday that it executed two men after convicting them of spying for Israel during last year’s 12-day war and the ongoing conflict. The state’s answer to espionage was final and irreversible. No trial details were given in the wire report, and the judiciary’s Mizan news agency did not specify where the executions took place.
The State’s Monopoly
The two men were identified by Mizan as Omid Behzad and Pouria Safvat. Reuters reported that they were Iranian nationals accused of sending sensitive military and security location coordinates to Israel during the Iran-war. The judiciary said they were accused of providing military coordinates, images and other intelligence used in attacks on Iranian targets. That is the machinery of state conflict in plain view: one state says it was attacked, another state says it needed intelligence, and the people caught between those systems end up in the hands of the hangman.
The executions came as Iran also publicly hanged two men last week who were convicted of killing four police officers during nationwide anti-government protests in January. The same apparatus that claims to defend order keeps showing how it enforces it. Police officers, intelligence services, courts and execution chambers all sit inside the same chain of command, and ordinary people are the ones who disappear into it.
Security, Protests, and the Machinery of Control
The report places the executions inside a wider cycle of conflict and repression. The men were said to have been spying during both last year’s 12-day war and the ongoing conflict. Reuters said they were accused of sending sensitive military and security location coordinates to Israel during the Iran-war. The language is bureaucratic, but the function is blunt. States trade accusations, militarize daily life, and then present punishment as proof of sovereignty.
Iran’s judiciary did not say where the executions took place. It also did not provide further details in the report about the legal process behind the convictions. That silence matters. In systems built on coercion, the public gets the verdict and the spectacle, not the workings.
The same week, Iran publicly hanged two men convicted of killing four police officers during nationwide anti-government protests in January. The juxtaposition is hard to miss. One set of executions is tied to external war and espionage; the other to internal unrest and the killing of police officers. Different charges, same state logic. The message is that the monopoly on violence belongs to the authorities, and anyone who crosses it can be made into an example.
Who Gets Crushed
Mizan said the two executed Monday were accused of providing military coordinates, images and other intelligence used in attacks on Iranian targets. Reuters identified them as Iranian nationals. The report does not say what evidence was presented, how the case was handled, or whether the men had any meaningful chance to contest the accusations. That gap is part of the story too. The state speaks in the language of security, but it rarely volunteers the terms of its own violence.
The executions also sit beside the broader conflict that the judiciary described as ongoing. In that setting, every state claims necessity. Every security service claims urgency. Every court claims legitimacy. The people named in the report do not get those privileges. They get classified, convicted and killed.
Iran’s public hangings last week and Monday’s executions show a system that answers both foreign conflict and domestic protest with the same instrument. The names change. The target changes. The structure doesn’t.