Iran executes over 1K prisoners in 2024, highest total in 30 years
Almost half of executions took place in last quarter, with 12 prisoners hanged on New Year’s Day
Fox News | By Beth Bailey | January 3, 2025
The Islamic Republic of Iran executed over 1,000 prisoners in 86 prisons across the country in 2024, according to a report by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). The report says the death toll is “an unprecedented figure in the past three decades,” and represents an increase of 16% from the 864 executions conducted in 2023.
Most of the regime’s executions took place in the latter half of the year. Almost 70% occurred after the July election of President Masoud Pezeshkian. About 47% took place in the fourth quarter of 2024, when the regime “faced severe defeats in the region and mounting economic and social crises,” the NCRI said.
Maryam Rajavi, the president-elect of the NCRI, said that the series of executions represent a “desperate attempt to prevent the uprising of an angry populace who will settle for nothing less than the regime’s complete overthrow. These medieval crimes, however, double the resolve of Iran’s youth to topple the religious dictatorship.”
According to Rajavi, “any negotiations or dealings with [the regime] must be conditioned on ending executions and torture. Its leaders must be brought to justice for 45 years of crimes against humanity and genocide.”
Fox News Digital reached out to the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations for comment about the regime’s record level of executions. The Mission declined to comment.
Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital that “the more the regime looks weak abroad, the more it is trying to double down to prevent a contagion effect on the home front. It is doing this by increasing the number of executions, including of political prisoners, non-violent offenders, and even hostages.” Taleblu said that October saw “a record number of killings by the clerical regime.”
The prisoners executed this year in Iran included 34 women and seven prisoners whose crimes were committed when they were juveniles. They also included 70 Afghan nationals, Amu TV reported. This represented an increase of about 300% over the prior year.
The NCRI reports that 119 of the executed prisoners were from the Baluchi minority. An August 2024 report from the United Nations-mandated Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran said that the Baluchis make up 2% of the Iranian population. The fact-finding mission also found that ethnic and religious minorities have been “disproportionately impacted by the Government’s response to the protests that began in September 2022,” after Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman arrested for not wearing a headscarf, died in Iranian custody.
Also among those executed by the Iranian regime in 2024 was 69-year-old journalist Jamshid Sharmahd, a German citizen and 20-year resident of the United States who was kidnapped in Dubai in 2020. Sharmahd was executed in October after being charged with “corruption on earth” in what was called a “grossly unfair” trial.
In an open letter shared by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, 25-year-old political prisoner Saeed Masouri wrote that “we witness an execution every four hours on average.” During Christmas, Masouri said that “nearly 25 innocent people were executed, equating to almost one execution every 2.5 hours.”
“I no longer know how much more I must see and endure,” Masouri writes, explaining that from the moment of his sentencing, he “consider[ed] every meeting to be [his] last and every ‘opening and closing’ sound of the door as a death knell.”
The NCRI reported that on the first day of 2025, 12 prisoners were executed by hanging at four Iranian prisons.
