Under a law meant to crack down on those cooperating with Israel and other states, Iran this week published a list of networks, media personalities and others it deems hostile to its regime.
Featuring high on the list is a prominent member of the Jerusalem News Syndicate. Emily Schrader, at No. 2 on the list of “hostile media persons,” is host of the JNS podcast “Axis of Truth” and co-host of “The Quad.”
The list is the first in connection with the ‘Law on Intensifying Punishment for Espionage and Cooperation with the Zionist Regime and Hostile States,’ passed by Iran’s parliament on Sept. 28, 2025, and enacted in October 2025 after approval by Iran’s Guardian Council.
Ekhtebar, an Iranian legal news portal that republishes legislation, regulations and official content of Iran’s government, publicized the list on Monday.
There are technically three lists, which were provided by the Islamic Republic’s Ministry of Intelligence in a May 3 letter to Mohammad Movahedi Azad, Iran’s prosecutor general: 1) hostile networks (44 entries) 2) hostile media persons (61 entries) and 3) hostile virtual pages (310 entries).
The last is a broad category that includes “sites, accounts and channels belonging to the institutions, executive agencies, ministries, embassies and representative offices of the Zionist regime, on all platforms,” according to a 30-page analysis of the legislation by Flack Partners PR, Ltd., a South Africa-based strategic communications firm.
The list of individuals includes exiled dissidents such as Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, Israeli analysts, such as Raz Zimmt, and Israeli advocacy figures, such as Naftali Hananya (No. 1) and Yoseph Haddad (No. 3).
JNS’s Schrader first landed on Iran’s radar when she spoke in opposition to the regime’s crackdown on the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests in 2022, though her activities as a journalist and activist on behalf of Iran’s people began before that, she told JNS.
In 2023, Schrader began meeting more intensely with lawmakers worldwide urging them to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.
Writing for Ynet in March 2023, Schrader said that “as a feminist, an Israeli, an American, and a journalist, I am the epitome of everything the Islamic Republic despises and wants to destroy. Even more problematic for them, their own people are standing with me. ... Over the past six months, I’ve amassed a following of over 70,000 Iranians inside Iran, and thousands more in the Iranian diaspora as well.”
Schrader said that she had become the target of numerous online attacks, and had been accused of working for the Mossad and the Jewish state. Iranian regime supporters posted pictures of her online with the graphic of a rifle scope site overlaying her head.
The enemies list law sends a disturbing message to those on the list. The 61 individuals are now categorized as “hostile instruments of the enemy,” a designation that has historically preceded kidnapping and assassination plots outside Iran, according to the Flack report.
The message to Iranians who contemplate contacting those listed is still more chilling. The law provides wide latitude for the Iranian authorities to sweep up whomever it considers a threat. It converts “ordinary journalistic, civic and online contact into serious felonies by executive fiat,” the report said. “Legally, the instrument completes the conversion of Iran’s information space into criminal jurisdiction.”
Anyone with a smartphone forwarding a protest video to an anti-regime site, such as Iran International, or posting a reply to an IDF post in Farsi faces a two-to-five-year term and possibly a capital charge, it said.
A prosecutorial feature
The list lumps journalists, Nobel laureates, think tanks and human rights groups together with armed Sunni jihadists.
This “deliberate flattening,” or erasing of the distinction between Jaish al-Adl, a jihadist group, and BBC Persian, and between Islamic State–Khorasan Province and PEN America, is the document’s chief characteristic, the report said. “[I]t is a prosecutorial feature rather than drafting carelessness: it lets any court treat contact with a journalist as the legal equivalent of contact with a terrorist organization.”
The law should be seen in the context of Iran’s killing spree that started last year. Iran’s regime executed more than 1,000 people in the first nine months of 2025, the United Nations reported in October of that year.
“With an average of more than nine hangings per day in recent weeks, Iran appears to be conducting executions at an industrial scale that defies all accepted standards of human rights protection,” U.N. experts said in the October 2025 report.
This is not to speak of the 40,000 summarily executed in the streets of Iran during mass protests at the end of 2025 into early 2026.
The espionage law was a direct result of Israel’s 12-day war (“Operation Rising Lion”) in June 2025. The day after the ceasefire on June 25, 2025, Iran’s parliament outlined a plan to stiffen penalties for espionage and collaboration “with the Zionist regime and hostile countries against national security and interests.”
Alireza Salimi, a prominent Iranian cleric and politician, said “any intelligence or espionage activity or practical action” that favors Israel, the United States and others could be considered Efsad fel-arz—“corruption on Earth”—an offense that carries the death penalty, Al Jazeera reported at the time.
What emerges from the lists is the seriousness with which Iran takes Israel as a threat. The list of “hostile virtual pages” includes “the entire digital presence of the Israeli state, every ministry, embassy and representative office, on every platform, in a single clause,” the Flack report said.
It is a candid omission by Iran of the danger posed by Israel’s information operations. By publishing its own threat map, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence has revealed the scale of its fear of open information and Israeli public diplomacy, the report said.
