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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
—
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Israel antiwar protests spur intensifying government crackdown
TEL AVIV, Israel — It was a strange sight, even for wartime Israel: A line of police horses descended into the vast public bomb shelter beneath Tel Aviv’s Habima Square — hooves clattering against the concrete as officers led them to safety.
While the horses got a police escort, just a few feet away, 17 antiwar demonstrators were stuck on a police bus, pleading to be let off before the incoming barrage of Iranian missiles reached the city.
They had been detained as part of the ongoing crackdown on Israelis protesting against the war with Iran, carried out in the name of wartime public safety.
This round of arrests took place on Saturday night. “Our phones began buzzing with the pre-siren warning,” recalled Alon-Lee Green, co-director of the Jewish-Palestinian coexistence group Standing Together and now one of the leaders of a burgeoning antiwar movement. “We kept asking them to let us go down to the shelter. They refused, even though this is completely against the law. They told us it was our problem because we chose to come to the protest.”
When the siren sounded — signaling 90 seconds to take cover — the argument escalated. Onlookers tried to intervene, urging police to allow the detainees into the shelter. Instead the driver took off for a nearby residential building. The activists, some still in handcuffs, were rushed into the lobby and ordered to lie on the floor. “This was not a protected space. We were under a bunch of glass windows,” Green recounted. “If there had been a direct hit … they put our lives at risk in a very serious way.”
In the weeks leading up to Israel and the United States’ joint strikes on Iran, support for full-scale war among Israelis was high, with most people convinced that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dire warning of the immediate and existential threat posed by Iran and his promise to eliminate it “for generations” were both truths. As the war began, and Israelis found themselves rushing into bomb shelters, support remained widespread.
But as the fighting has continued to drag on, the antiwar movement has followed a sharp growth trajectory: from a small gathering of far-left activists outnumbered by the journalists reporting on them to multi-city demonstrations drawing more than 1,000 participants each week. The numbers are still modest compared to the tens of thousands who filled Israel’s streets weekly during the judicial overhaul protests and the hostage demonstrations after Oct. 7, but a significant jump given how popular the war was at its outset.
The rise of the protest movement coincides with a shift in public opinion. Support for the war, which began above 80%, has dropped into the high 60s in recent weeks — still a clear majority, but a meaningful decline for a conflict that initially drew near-unanimous backing. One month in, war fatigue has begun to set in. In addition to the growing death and injury toll and financial loss, Israelis are sleep-deprived, desperate for school to resume, and frustrated that the airport is still not operating at full capacity. They are also watching as the government slashes the state budget.
Organizers say they are encouraged by the rapid growth, even as they navigate the pitfalls of coalition-building. But for now, the movement faces a more immediate challenge: as crowds grow, so too does the force being used by uniformed and plainclothes Israeli police officers to disperse them.
Arrests, forcible removal of demonstrators and confiscation of equipment have now become regular occurrences. According to police, these are legitimate methods for dispersing protests, which they say violate Home Front Command directives restricting large gatherings during wartime. But with beaches and malls around the country packed with people, and Haredi communities holding massive funerals, weddings and holiday celebrations, critics have accused far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir of using those same restrictions as a pretext to silence dissent.
That debate has now moved from the streets to the courtroom. Just as Saturday’s protest was getting underway, Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled that blanket restrictions used to shut down demonstrations did not sufficiently account for the basic right to protest, which the court president stated exists even during wartime. The court ordered the state to raise the cap on demonstrations from 150 to at least 600 people, including at Habima Square.
The ruling came in response to a petition filed the day before by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and activist Itamar Greenberg, following weeks of aggressive police dispersals. The court also raised concerns about selective enforcement, noting that similar restrictions were not being applied to other large gatherings.
By Saturday night, the decision was already being tested. As hundreds of demonstrators gathered once again at Habima Square, part of coordinated protests that also drew crowds in Haifa and Jerusalem, organizers said they were operating within the court’s guidelines. Police disagreed. Citing security concerns and Home Front Command restrictions, officers moved quickly and forcefully to disperse the crowd, confiscating amplification equipment and signs and arresting 17 people, including Green.
“But we learned afterwards that the police had begged Home Front Command to give the order that the protest was illegal, and they refused,” he said. “After 30 minutes, the police just decided to act on their own command and begin arresting people.”
IDF officials later confirmed to Haaretz that dispersing the demonstration had not been approved by the Home Front Command, saying the decision was made by police alone. The High Court is expected to revisit the issue this week, even as Justice Minister Yariv Levin has called on the government to consider defying any ruling that expands protest rights during wartime.
For Green, the past few weeks reflect a deeper societal shift. “What we’re seeing is the legitimization of political violence,” he said. “It starts with words — calling people traitors for opposing the war or supporting peace — and it slowly becomes something more.” In recent months, a spate of right-wing provocateurs have begun harassing and intimidating journalists, politicians, and protesters with whom they disagree. Prominent leaders, including Green, have also been targeted at their homes.
He added: “When the public sees that it’s becoming dangerous to speak out, to organize, to protest — that violence is an acceptable way to silence a political camp — it changes the entire public space.”
Both Green and Greenberg stress that the antiwar movement is not the first, nor the primary, target of such force. “By no means did this start with our movement,” Greenberg noted. “It begins with the Palestinians. They bear the brunt of police brutality. But that’s how fascism works — people remain silent, and eventually it comes for them.”
Green agrees. “It’s a slow but powerful process of stripping legitimacy from an entire political camp,” he said, “and giving permission to act against it with violence.”
While that threat has surely kept individuals at home, the movement as a whole continues to expand. It now includes veterans of the antigovernment movement, first-time demonstrators, and public figures such as Hadash-Ta’al political party lawmakers Ofer Cassif and Ayman Odeh — even as many prominent opposition figures remain absent.
For Greenberg, the growth is both intentional and complicated. “We not only expected it,” he said. “We were trying to make it happen as soon as possible.”
“As someone who identifies as a radical anti-Zionist, I understand the limits of my political power. We are a small group. But we are part of this society, and we can still create a movement of resistance to this war.”
That has required letting go of control. “We started this, but now we are part of something bigger,” he said. “There are people at the protests whose views I totally disagree with … but right now we have one mutual goal, to stop this war. I cannot afford to be picky.”
Green suggests that tension is central to the movement’s future. “This is where we see Standing Together’s role — to help build as wide a coalition as possible,” he said, describing efforts to bring together more than 50 groups around a broadly shared platform. “Anti-war, anti-government, anti-abandonment, pro-life. Whoever can agree to this can be in the tent.”
It is a fragile coalition. “Right now, we still feel that our specific voice is being heard loudly and clearly,” he said. “But what happens when it grows to 10,000 people and suddenly we are in the minority?”
“It becomes about finding a balance,” Greenberg continued, “Continuing to show up at largest protests and representing the anti-occupation bloc but also making sure that we are developing separate ways to express our specific beliefs.”
For Green, however, the moment feels larger than any one single cause or agenda.
“I think we’re facing a moment where all the different fronts are uniting,” he said. “People are starting to understand that whether you are coming from a humanitarian viewpoint or from a solidarity viewpoint or anti-government or even self-interest, it’s all connected to one overarching question: Are we going to find a way to live here in peace or are we are going to be stuck in this constant state of war, forever fighting, stealing, assassinating, running to shelters, our children missing school?”
As the protests continue to grow — even amid efforts to suppress them — organizers believe they have opened a space that did not exist just weeks ago.
“We have the opportunity,” Green said, “to present a different way.”
The post Israel antiwar protests spur intensifying government crackdown appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish Georgetown Student Defeats $10 Million Lawsuit Filed by Fired Official Who Promoted Antisemitism
Anti-Israel demonstration on the campus of Georgetown University in Washington, DC in September 2024. Photo: Bryan Olin Dozier via Reuters Connect
A Jewish undergraduate student has defeated a $10 million lawsuit brought by a fired Georgetown University administrator who filed the claim because the student’s efforts to criticize the official’s sharing of antisemitic invective on social media contributed to the termination of their employment.
The student’s victory parries a barrage of accusations which the former administrator, Aneesa Johnson, lobbed at the student, Georgetown, and others. It also vindicates the free speech rights of Jewish students denouncing antisemitism at the highest levels of university governance, according to the student’s legal counsel, provided by The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Gibson Dunn.
“This ruling is a victory for every student who has ever feared speaking out against antisemitism on campus,” Brandeis Center chairman Kenneth Marcus said in a statement. “A young woman raised her voice about hateful content posted by a university administrator — and was sued for it. Today, the court made clear that kind of retaliation has no place in our legal system. The Brandeis Center will always stand with those who refuse to stay silent.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Johnson’s appointment to Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) in 2023 drew widespread criticism, as she had a history of writing hateful statements about Jews and Israel.
Those statements went back as far as 2015, according to an investigation of her social media activity that was led by Canary Mission. In July of that year, Johnson tweeted: “Ever since going to [Northwestern University] I have a deep seated [sic] hate for Zio [sic] b—ches. They bring out the worst in me.” Johnson also said, “You know why I call them Zio b—ches, because they’re dogs.”
“Zio” is an antisemitic slur brought into prominence by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. While the term, derived from “Zionist,” has generally been deployed by white supremacists and other far-right extremists, it has more recently been used as well by anti-Israel activists on the progressive far left to refer to Jews in a derogatory manner.
A week following the aforementioned posts, Johnson, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), retweeted an unflattering picture of an Orthodox Jew and captioned it, “When the whole world hates you bc you a thief and you grow up looking like shaytan [the devil] #GrowingUpIsraeli.”
Six years later, in 2021, Johnson said on a podcast that US support for Israel is due to the influence of “the really powerful Zionist lobby that advocates for policies, statements, voting patterns that benefit the State of Israel.”
Having been hired to be the “primary point of contact” for master’s students on “everything academic” at the SFS, Jewish advocacy groups protested that any Jewish student should be forced to interact with Johnson. Georgetown University heeded their complaints and ultimately fired Johnson and in doing so set off the events which placed a Jewish undergraduate in the middle of a lawsuit seeking a windfall of damages.
The March 31 ruling dismissed the complaint as undermining the “marketplace of ideas,” freeing the student to move on with life.
“This retaliatory lawsuit … sought to punish her exercise of First Amendment rights and chill the expression of countless others,” Gibson Dunn partner Elizabeth Papez said in a statement. “We’re especially pleased that the court agreed our client’s First Amendment defense ‘packs a strong punch’ and compels dismissal with prejudice. The ruling sets a precedent that courts will not tolerate the use of the judicial system to punish those who speak out against antisemitism.”
The Brandeis Center’s legal advocacy has delivered a slew of victories for Jewish students and faculty in 2026.
In March, the organization negotiated a major agreement to settle a lawsuit it filed against the University of California, Berkeley in 2023 over its allegedly failing to address a series of incidents of campus antisemitism which culminated in anti-Zionist students establishing “Jewish-free zones” where pro-Israel advocates were barred from speaking.
The details of the settlement call for for Berkeley’s using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism as a reference tool, stating a “reaffirmation” of antisemitism as a violation of the code of conduct, conducting an annual survey of the Jewish student body, and appointing an official to manage the school’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination at universities receiving taxpayer money to fund research and other operations. UC Berkeley will also pay the Brandeis Center $1 million as reimbursement for “outside attorneys’ fees and costs incurred” during litigation of the suit.
Joined by the StandWithUs Saidoff Law, the Brandeis Center announced on April 1 that City College of San Francisco (CCSF) upheld the findings of an investigation which found that a Jewish professor, Abigail Bornstein, experienced antisemitic discrimination during a series of explosive confrontations in which now-former CCSF employee Maria Salazar-Colon called her “colonizer,” “Dumb-stein,” and demanded that she “shut the f—k up.”
Those utterances, combined with other comments related to Israel, indicated Salazar-Colon’s awareness of Bornstein’s Jewishness and her willingness to degrade her over it, the Brandeis Center and StandWithUs said — noting that a trivial discussion on college “governance,” not politics or the Middle East conflict, set the staff member off. Salazar-Colon then continued targeting Bornstein through email, denouncing her again as a “colonizer” and making other crude statements. She ultimately drove Bornstein off campus, where she attempted to work remotely while filing formal complaints with the university and the local police department.
“The college did the right thing here. They brought in an independent investigator. They made clear that this was about discrimination based on Bornstein’s protected identity, that being Jewish — not union advocacy — and that’s important and a necessary distinction that we don’t often see being recognized,” Brandeis Center counsel Deena Margolies told The Algemeiner during an interview. “I’m seeing many more of these disciplinary matters in the employee context, and I notice that what often happens is that when a Jewish professor or staff member is targeted or files a complaint, there is often a cross complaint, a baseless complaint which is retaliatory. And yet, they always end up coming through.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Iran’s Internet Blackout Hits Record Length as Regime Tries to Crush Dissent in Digital Darkness
People attend the funeral of the security forces who were killed in the protests that erupted over the collapse of the currency’s value in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 14, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iran’s internet blackout became the longest such nationwide shutdown ever recorded over the weekend, as the regime continued to face mounting military pressure, internal unrest, and growing isolation.
According to NetBlocks, an internet-monitoring watchdog that tracks global connectivity disruptions, Iran’s blackout entered its 37th consecutive day on Sunday, making it the longest nation-scale internet shutdown on record after authorities severed internet access as the war with the US and Israel broke out in late February.
The blackout continued on Monday, with the general public cut off from international networks for over 888 hours.
With the regime attempting to suppress internal opposition and silence domestic dissent, the blackout has effectively cut millions of Iranians off from independent reporting on the war and access to global news.
“We constantly find ourselves searching for ways to reconnect, just to be able to hear reliable news,” a 47-year-old woman in the central city of Isfahan told AFP on Saturday.
“Being without internet feels like being without oxygen to me. I feel trapped and suffocated,” a 53-year-old man in Tehran also said.
Iranian authorities have even warned that citizens suspected of accessing internet through virtual private networks (VPNs) — tools that bypass government censorship — could face arrest or imprisonment.
According to state media reports, Iranian security forces have arrested several citizens in recent weeks for using the Starlink satellite internet system, which allows users to bypass state-controlled terrestrial infrastructure.
Iran’s latest internet shutdown marks the second nationwide blackout in less than two months, after authorities previously imposed an 18-day outage in January during mass anti-government protests, which security forces violently crushed, leaving tens of thousands of demonstrators tortured or killed.
Human rights groups warn the regime has repeatedly used nationwide internet shutdowns as a tool to intensify its crackdown on opposition movements and conceal ongoing abuses from international scrutiny.
In recent years, Iranian authorities have accelerated efforts to sever the country’s reliance on the global web by advancing the regime-backed “National Internet” project aimed at consolidating state control over digital communications and information flows.
Meanwhile, the Islamist regime continues to face relentless pressure from US and Israeli strikes as the conflict escalates and prospects for negotiations become increasingly fragile.
In one of its latest attacks, Israel announced that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence chief Brig. Gen. Majid Khademi and Quds Force special operations commander Asghar Bagheri were both killed over the weekend.
This latest strike on leadership represents a “significant blow to Iran’s intelligence leadership at a time when the regime is already under sustained pressure,” an Israeli security official told Fox News.
According to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Khademi orchestrated overseas terrorist operations and oversaw surveillance targeting Iranian civilians during the regime’s brutal crackdown on protests.
Part of Iran’s elite military force, Bagheri coordinated the recruitment of terrorist operatives across the Middle East and directed deadly attacks against US and Israeli targets abroad.
On Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced the IDF also struck Iran’s largest petrochemical facility in Asaluyeh, a blow that has effectively taken offline the two plants responsible for roughly 85 percent of the country’s petrochemical exports, crippling a key pillar of Iran’s economy and export capacity.
Katz described the strikes as “a severe economic blow to the Iranian regime, amounting to tens of billions of dollars.”
“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I have instructed the IDF to continue to attack the national infrastructure of the Iranian terror regime with all its might,” the Israeli defense chief said.
“The Iranian terror regime will discover that the continued aggression against Israel and the cowardly and criminal fire at Israeli citizens will lead to the deepening of the economic and strategic damage it is paying and the collapse of its capabilities,” he continued.