Two US-Iranian citizens are among the members of the Jewish community arrested in Iran amid a sweeping government crackdown that began last month as fighting ended with Israel, according to Hebrew media reports.
The two men, who both live in the US, were in Iran to visit family when the 12-day war started with Israeli strikes on Iran.
“They were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said a source familiar with efforts for their release, cited by both the Kan public broadcaster and the Ynet news outlet on Sunday.
Some 35 members of the Jewish community were reportedly arrested at the end of the war on suspicion of having contacts with Israel. All but five have since been released, according to reports.
One of the dual US-Iranian citizens lives in Los Angeles. He was released on bail a few days ago.
The other, who is still being held, has lived in New York for at least 30 years, reports said.
The remaining three Jews held were detained because they posted to social media against the regime, or liked such posts by others, Ynet reported.
The Jewish representative in the Iranian parliament, Homayoun Sameyah Najaf Abadi, in an update Saturday said that he had met with the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps judiciary, which is handling the cases, and reached an agreement to release most of the detainees.
Najaf Abadi said that the espionage charges against all the detainees have been rejected.
“We hope that as a result of continued cooperation, the remaining problems will soon be resolved,” he was quoted by Ynet as saying. The report did not specify which of the five detainees would be released and which would remain behind bars.
Arrests of Jewish community members were made in Tehran, Shiraz, and Alborz province.
Iranian officials have been hunting alleged collaborators with Israel following Israel’s strikes on Iran and the bombing of the country’s nuclear facilities by the United States.
A former senior Iranian communal leader, who would speak only on condition of anonymity due to concerns for his contacts in Iran, has previously said Iranian authorities are checking the cellphones of those they arrest, looking for records of any calls to Israel.
He said most Iranian Jews have family in Israel. Though any connection to Israel is prohibited, calls to family members in the past were quietly tolerated, he said. In the wake of the war with Israel, the authorities are now drastically tightening their policies.
Aside from members of the Jewish community, more than 700 other people have been detained by authorities since June 13, when Israel launched its surprise attack on Iran.
Israel said its sweeping assault on the country’s top military leaders, nuclear scientists, uranium enrichment sites, and ballistic missile program was necessary to prevent the Islamic Republic from realizing its avowed plan to destroy the Jewish state.
After 12 days of fighting, at the end of which the US also hit three Iranian nuclear sites, Washington brokered a ceasefire.
The arrest sweep came as Israeli authorities themselves have boasted about the deep penetration into Iran that their intelligence agencies achieved to plan for its attack, including footage purporting to show agents launching drones from within Iran.
But Israel has no known record of recruiting assets from within Iran’s closely monitored Jewish community, which today numbers around 10,000 people.
Members of the community, which stood at over 80,000 before the 1979 revolution that brought Iran’s Islamic regime to power, have generally remained free to practice their religion and organize themselves communally, including maintenance of their own schools and social welfare institutions. They remain free to emigrate, though taking their assets out with them can be a problem.
Those who remain live with various forms of legal discrimination that sharia, or Islamic religious law, imposes on all non-Muslims in Iran, and social discrimination that prohibits their rising above certain levels in government or military positions.