Have Iran's warmongering hardliners at home and abroad been played by Israel?

What he says

An English translation of the talk, which is in Persian. It was made with AI from YouTube's automatic captions and may contain errors; the Persian transcript is authoritative. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

0:01 Hello. It is Monday, 22 Tir 1405, July 13, 2026. Last week, Iran invoked Article 5 of the 14-article memorandum of understanding with America to claim that management of the Strait of Hormuz must be coordinated with Iran for any ship that wants to pass. It then attacked three ships in the Strait of Hormuz with drones, ships that were passing, in coordination with America, through a waterway along the side close to Omani waters. After that, the war between Iran and America started again and kept intensifying.

0:58 Over the following two or three nights, America struck at least 35 targets inside Iranian territory. After each attack, Iran in turn struck American bases and other locations in Bahrain, Kuwait, even Qatar and Jordan, and today it also struck a location in Oman. This escalation, especially yesterday, led to American attacks on cities in the provinces of Khuzestan, Bushehr, Hormozgan, and Sistan and Baluchestan. Iran officially announced that the Strait of Hormuz is now closed. In other words, Article 5

1:58 of the memorandum, which says that within 30 days Iran will make arrangements for the Strait to be fully open and return to its pre-war state, has been put aside. It is void. America also announced that it has set aside Article 4, under which America had said it would end the naval blockade of Iran, and that starting tomorrow, Tuesday, at 11:30 p.m. Iran time, the naval blockade of Iran will begin again. On another front, Iranian aircraft, Iranian commercial aircraft, had begun flying to Yemen, and Saudi Arabia's puppet government in the south, and probably also the Saudi air force, attacked the airport in Sanaa, the airport runway,

3:00 so that the Iranian plane could not land. As a result, it went to Hodeidah and landed there. It was a Mahan Air plane. Apparently the Houthis had threatened retaliation over this, and they in turn struck Saudi airports. It is said that the reason for all this is that the Islamic Republic is busy transferring equipment, missiles, personnel, and so on and so forth via commercial aircraft in order to begin attacks on the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

3:52 This is something that Mr. Hossein Shariatmadari, who is known as a hardliner, explicitly said today: "Close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and then see the results." Presumably he claims that for years he had been saying "close the Strait of Hormuz," and that the result has been, say, very positive. In any case, it appears that with the violation of Articles 4 and 5 of the memorandum between Iran and America, the negotiations are suspended for now. Mr. Trump has also said that tonight and tomorrow night America will carry out even heavier attacks, and in effect the two countries are once again in a state of war. Perhaps one could say this is the result

4:49 of the slogans the hardliners inside Iran chanted during the marathon funeral ceremonies for Khamenei. The organizers of these events staged numerous displays in the streets about revenge, against the memorandum, against peace, and against anyone who has negotiated, and so on. The outcome has been that this coordination between the regime's hardliners inside the country and the supposedly anti-regime hardliners abroad, who are mostly followers of the Israelis' policy, has, in short, set the fire of war ablaze. Interestingly, today the New York Times published a lengthy article, the result of an investigation by four of

5:52 its journalists, one of whom is Ms. Farnaz Fassihi, who is of Iranian origin, about Ahmadinejad. It expands on its earlier report in greater detail and with more evidence: namely, that in 2023 Ahmadinejad went to Guatemala, the Latin American country closest to Israel, and spoke there with Israeli agents, following contacts they had previously had with him. And in 2024, when he went to Hungary, the Hungary where Mr. Viktor Orbán was still in power, someone who was very close to Israel among

6:49 European countries, he met with Mossad agents there too. The New York Times even says that David Barnea, the then head of Mossad, met with Ahmadinejad in Hungary. In other words, Ahmadinejad, who once denied the Holocaust, said destroying Israel is our undeniable right, said "issue sanctions and resolutions until your resolution-dispenser tears," and was in fact regarded as one of the hardline figures, now, given these details, if they are true, turns out to have been, or become, very much in league with Israel. Mr. Ahmadinejad's office today denied the

7:48 New York Times report and said, in short, that it is fantasy. The same report also states that Ahmadinejad is under so-called house arrest, and Mr. Ahmadinejad's office has in a way denied that as well. In any case, when you put all of this together, the question arises: the pro-war hardliners abroad, who shamelessly say in interviews that they went to Israel and that it was actually because of their talks that, for example, Israel and America went to war with Iran in this way, and the hardliners inside the country who constantly

8:43 beat the drum of war and in effect accuse those who may be more moderate and want to somehow reach a ceasefire and peace of capitulation, of, I don't know, treason, lying, and so on and so forth, is Israel backing and strengthening them through the overt and covert agents it has, or not? It seems it is not far-fetched that Israel, whose grand strategy could be to throw Iran into turmoil, drag the country into civil war, and destroy Iran's capabilities as much as possible, would do this. Because right now Israel is, so to speak, lying in wait,

9:38 so that if America gives it permission once more, since last time America held Israel back from striking Iran's infrastructure in the 40-day war, this time it would attack and hit Iran's energy infrastructure, and then everything would shut down: electricity, gas, refineries, and so on. And this at a time when, according to the Ministry of Energy, the Tavanir company already has a 420-megawatt electricity shortfall, blackouts have begun, and of course water cuts have also begun in various places. On top of that, electricity for many industries

10:30 has been rationed, and they are without power several days a week. Interestingly, all this warmongering, this call in effect for the destruction of Iran, is happening in a country where a survey by the ARA Institute, conducted for the Office of the President of Iran and analyzed by Mr. Ali Rabiei, who was once a deputy at the Ministry of Intelligence, shows, setting aside how accurate this poll is or isn't, or its methods, since it has not explained in detail what methods and methodologies were used, at least shows that 82% of people have trouble providing for their food,

11:26 75% have trouble paying for medical expenses, 54% spend more than they earn, and only 11% said they had taken part in these nightly pro-war, pro-government gatherings. In other words, an absolute majority of people want peace and calm. Interestingly, 53 or 54% of Iranian society want fundamental changes, and 19% want a change of the entire regime altogether. That is, at least two-thirds of the people are deeply dissatisfied with the current situation and want change.

12:21 But Mr. Trump, whose exaggerations and incoherent remarks never end, said today in an interview with Fox News that we will keep the Strait of Hormuz open and we will also collect the cost of it; we will take a 20% toll. How exactly, he didn't say, to cover the cost of keeping the Strait of Hormuz open. This is one of those statements where, on the one hand, Mr. Trump himself and others constantly say that it is contrary to international law for Iran to want to collect tolls from ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, and on the other hand, Mr. Trump raises something like this himself. Hoping for the victory of Iran and Iranians.