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Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian speaks during a meeting in Ilam, Iran, June 12, 2025. Photo: Iran’s Presidential website/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS

Iran has endured an extreme drought in recent months, depleting the country’s reservoirs and leading President Masoud Pezeshkian to warn that the capital may even need to be evacuated.

“If rationing doesn’t work, we may have to evacuate Tehran,” Pezeshkian said last week, adding that the Iranian regime will start restricting water supplies in the city next month if there isn’t more rain.

According to Abbasali Keykhaei of the Iranian Water Resources Management Company, 19 major dams comprising 10 percent of the country’s reservoirs have run dry. In Tehran — a city with 10 million people in the city itself and 18 million in the metropolitan area — five dams that provide drinking water have hit “critical” levels, with one at below 8 percent capacity.

Hossein Esmaeilian, managing director of the Water and Wastewater Company in Mashad, the country’s second largest city with four million residents, told state media that reserves have fallen below 3 percent and that “the current situation shows that managing water use is no longer merely a recommendation – it has become a necessity.”

Esmaeilian added that “only 3 percent of the combined capacity of Mashhad’s four water-supplying dams — Torogh, Kardeh, Doosti, and Ardak — remains. Apart from Doosti Dam, the other three are out of operation.”

Iranian Energy Minister Abbas Ali Abadi has stated that “some nights we might decrease the water flow to zero.” He said on Iranian state television on Saturday that this was needed “so that reservoirs can refill.”

“If people can reduce consumption by 20 percent, it seems possible to manage the situation without rationing or cutting off water,” Esmaeilian urged Iranians, suggesting that those consuming the most would see cuts to their water supply first.

However, environmental researcher Azam Bahrami told German media outlet DW that “reduced consumption among the population is nowhere near enough to overcome this crisis.”

“One look at the water consumption pyramid shows that the agriculture sector consumes about 80-90 percent, the biggest share,” Bahrami continued. “As long as other sectors are positioned as priority … the water saving measures will not be very successful.”

The BBC reported that Iranian weather officials do not expect rain in the next 10 days. Mohammad-Ali Moallem, who manages the Karaj Dam, said that there was a 92 percent decrease in rain compared to last year.

“We have only 8 percent water in our reservoir — and most of it is unusable and considered ‘dead water,’” he added.

Stuttgart University researcher Mohammad Javad Tourian told DW about the rate of water loss Iran has seen in recent years.

“Iran loses a volume the size of Lake Constance almost every three years,” Tourian said. “In total, some 370 cubic kilometers have disappeared over the last 23 years. This means the problem is very serious.”

The question of a potential evacuation of Tehran remains unresolved. Former Tehran Mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi stated that fleeing the city due to the drought “makes no sense at all.”

Tourian identified actions that Iran could take to provide “rapid relief,” saying that prioritizing drinking water in key cities and the “temporary diverting of less critical usage” could be effective as quick, short-term steps.

However, actions to create a sustainable solution to the water crisis remain elusive.

While the Islamic regime in Iran struggles to quench the thirst of the Iranian people, its military reportedly remains stocked in its missiles targeting Israel.

“Our missile power today far surpasses that of the 12-day war,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said last week, referring to the regime’s brief conflict with Israel in June. “The enemy in the recent 12-day war failed to achieve all its objectives and was defeated.”

Brig. Gen. Aziz Nasirzadeh likewise boasted of Iranian military might, saying on Monday that the country’s “defense production has improved both in quantity and quality compared to before the 12-day Israeli-imposed war in June.”

Last week, a US official confirmed that Iran had initiated a plan to assassinate Ambassador Einat Kranz Neiger, Israel’s emissary in Mexico City.

“The plot was contained and does not pose a current threat,” the official told i24 News. “This is just the latest in a long history of Iran’s global lethal targeting of diplomats, journalists, dissidents, and anyone who disagrees with them, something that should deeply worry every country where there is an Iranian presence.”

(JTA) — Pope Leo XIV included the 1997 Holocaust movie “Life Is Beautiful” among his four favorite films of all time.

“Life Is Beautiful,” a melodrama by Italian filmmaker and comedian Robert Benigni, follows an Italian Jewish father and his son as they are sent to a Nazi concentration camp. There the father uses humor and misdirection in an effort to hide the truth of the camps from his son.

The film was a global box-office hit and received seven Oscar nominations, winning three. Another movie set during Nazi rule, the 1965 musical “The Sound of Music,” also made the pope’s list, which was rounded out by the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” and Robert Redford’s stark family drama, “Ordinary People.”

Pope Leo did not elaborate on his reasons for the selections in the truncated video posted by Variety announcing a convening of filmmakers at the Vatican that will begin Saturday.

“Life Is Beautiful” has long been a controversial film among Jews. While some embraced it as a fable of spiritual resistance, critics recoiled at the juxtaposition of broad humor with the Holocaust and said it distorted the experience of concentration camp victims and survivors. Among its critics is Mel Brooks, who also objected that Benigni was not Jewish and couldn’t fully understand the Holocaust. (The actor-director’s Catholic father reportedly was held prisoner in Bergen-Belsen during the war.)

The Vatican also announced that several global filmmakers would be attending the upcoming cinema convening, to begin Saturday. Those include Jewish comedy director Judd Apatow; Pawel Pawlikowski, a Polish filmmaker of Jewish descent and the director of the Oscar-winning Holocaust film “Ida”; and Marco Bellochio, the Italian director of a historical film about the 19th-century kidnapping of Italian Jewish boy Edgardo Mortara by the Catholic Church.

The pope, who formerly studied under a Catholic leader of Jewish-Catholic relations in the U.S., recently held an event marking the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the declaration that overturned centuries of Catholic doctrine by absolving Jews of killing Jesus. At the event, a member of the pope’s Swiss guard allegedly made a spitting gesture toward a Jewish woman guest; the Vatican recently announced an internal investigation into the matter.

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