The speeches will not free people from prison. The condemnations will not reopen the Internet. The statements will not stop the bullets. Only decisive leadership can do that.
The Islamic Republic built its identity on two chants, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” It painted US and Israeli flags on Tehran’s sidewalks so people could trample them. It spent 47 years exporting terror through proxies, pouring Iranian money into Hezbollah and the Houthis, and treating permanent confrontation as a governing principle. Now, in a twist the regime never prepared for, Iranians in the streets are addressing their pleas to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump. Some are renaming streets after Trump. They are filming video messages aimed at Washington and Jerusalem, not Brussels.
That is the moment. It is also the moral test. The death toll remains hard to verify because the regime throttles communications and blocks documentation. Still, the picture is ghastly. At The Jerusalem Post, we reported that Iran International estimated over 12,000 killed, while stressing the figures are unconfirmed, and that a US-based rights organization, HRANA, has confirmed at least 646 deaths with additional cases under review. Israeli officials told the Post that the estimates are between 2,000 and 3,000 Iranians killed.
The UN human rights chief says he is “horrified” by the violence and that “this cycle of horrific violence cannot continue,” while UN sources cite tolls in the hundreds. Those gaps in the numbers do not soften the reality. The regime is shooting, arresting, and threatening its own people at scale. Iran’s foreign minister still tries to reframe the uprising as “terrorism,” and still points the finger at Israel. This is the same playbook Tehran uses every time its grip slips, blame an outside enemy, then tighten the screws at home. (Read More)
