The aircraft, belonging to the Parsis Pilot Training Center, carried both a teacher pilot, identified as Omid Hashemian, and a student.
Regrettably, the crash resulted in the loss of both lives.
As investigations continue, authorities are working to piece together the circumstances surrounding this devastating event.
Ayatollah Khamenei made the remarks during a meeting with thousands of people from Qom on Tuesday, marking the anniversary of the 1978 popular uprising in the holy city against the former US-backed Pahlavi regime.
He said that a limited number of people in a limited area of land called the Gaza Strip managed to frustrate the United States and its vassal the Zionist regime.
The Leader emphasized that in the case of Gaza, predictions about the victory of the Palestinian resistance and the defeat of the “evil Zionist regime” are coming true.
The crimes that Israel is committing against the Palestinians will be recorded in history even after the regime is wiped off the face of the earth, he asserted.
Additionally, he noted, it will not be forgotten that the patience of the Palestinian people and their resilience forced the occupying regime to retreat.
“The Zionist regime has not achieved any of its objectives after committing nearly a hundred days of crimes. What does defeat mean? That’s what defeat means. They said we will destroy Hamas, but they failed. They said we will transfer the people of Gaza, but they failed. They said we will stop the actions of the resistance, but they failed,” Ayatollah Khamenei stated.
“The resistance is alive, fresh and ready, [while] the regime is tired, humiliated and regretful with a criminal stamp on its forehead. This is the situation that exists today. It bears a lesson.”
He also vowed a harsh response to the recent Daesh terrorist attack in the city of Kerman which killed 93 people.
Ayatollah Khamenei stressed that the “sorrowful and disastrous” tragedy afflicted the nation and that the Islamic Republic insists on “finding and suppressing the real and behind-the-scene perpetrators of the incident.”
The Leader also added the enemies of the Islamic Revolution, the US, world powers and Zionists are pursuing a strategic policy that is the people’s non-participation in the upcoming parliamentary elections, saying they want to “drag people out of the field of fighting, competition and battle”.
The number of people killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7 has risen to 23,210, the health Ministry in the blockaded territory reported on Tuesday.
That staggering death toll means that 1% of the enclave’s total pre-war population of 2.27 million people has now has been wiped out.
The majority of victims are children and women, according to health officials.
According to the ministry, an additional 59,167 people have been injured, which means more than one in 40 Gazans have now been wounded in the conflict.
The United Nations’ World Health Organisation (WHO) fears that hospitals in the southern and central Gaza Strip will collapse the way they did in the north.
“What we’re seeing is really worrying around a lot of the hospitals and an intensification of hostilities, very close to the European Gaza hospital,” Sean Casey, WHO Emergency Medical Teams coordinator in Gaza, told a Geneva press briefing by video link.
“We are seeing the health system collapse at a very rapid pace,” he added, stating that an estimated 600 patients had fled one facility.
He also stressed that the referrals of patients out of Gaza are “not working” and expressed “huge concern” about 66 health workers detained by Israeli forces.
Israel has pounded the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by Palestinian group Hamas in October.
The onslaught has left Gaza in ruins, with 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure damaged or destroyed and nearly 2 million residents displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine.
An Israeli human rights group has accused the government of starving more than two million people in the Gaza Strip amid its deadly military offensive on the Palestinian enclave.
“The 2.2 million people of Gaza are going hungry. This is not a byproduct of war but a direct result of Israel’s declared policy, which denies them food,” B’Tselem said in a statement on Monday.
The rights group added Israeli authorities are “letting in only a fraction of the amount entering before the war, with limitations on the types of goods” instead of allowing enough food into the territory.
“Allowing food into Gaza is not an act of kindness but a positive obligation under IHL (International Humanitarian Law),” B’Tselem said, adding, “Refusing to comply with this duty constitutes a war crime.”
“Groupings of Russian troops are methodically reducing the combat potential of the Ukrainian armed forces. Over the past year, enemy losses exceeded 215,000 servicepeople and 28,000 weapons systems. We maintain the strategic initiative along the entire line of combat contact,” Shoigu said at a working meeting with military leaders on Tuesday.
Summarizing the situation at the front, the defense minister pointed to signs of Ukraine’s military formations experiencing a depletion of manpower, and failing to achieve any of their stated objectives on the battlefield against Russian forces.
But in spite of this situation, “the United States is cold-bloodedly trying to achieve its ambitions for global leadership at the expense of Ukrainian lives. At the instigation of its Western curators, the Kiev regime continues to drive its soldiers to slaughter, and is searching for any opportunities to replenish the ranks of the Ukrainian Army.”
“This will not change the situation on the line of combat, but only prolong the military conflict,” he added.
Turning to the Russian defense industry’s efforts to keep the military supplied with weapons and equipment, Shoigu confirmed that these efforts would include a focus on all types of unmanned aerial vehicles, including heavy strike drones.
“We will increase the supply of the most popular models. In particular, we will form a serial line of unmanned aerial vehicles — from mini drones to heavy attack UAVs,” Shoigu said.
Regarding matters of global strategic stability, the defense minister reiterated that Russia maintains the combat readiness of its nuclear triad at a high level to ensure a global strategic balance.
“One of the key tasks is maintaining the combat readiness of the nuclear triad at the highest level, which ensures a strategic balance in the world.”
Russia will continue to upgrade its equipment, including using new AI technology, and weapons based on new physical principles, Shoigu added.
The Ministry of Defense also has plans this year to upgrade its communication, reconnaissance, target designation, counter-battery warfare, air defense and satellite systems, the defense minister indicated.
Other plans include efforts to improve tactics for the use of troops, and updates to the provisions of regulations and manuals in light of operational experience, Shoigu said. Additionally, social security payments to participants of the special military operation and their families remain a priority, he said.
“Solving these and other tasks will allow us to increase the combat capabilities of the Armed Forces and ensure deterrence against aggression against our country and its allies,” Shoigu added.
Russia’s military enters 2024 in a confident state after successfully halting Ukraine’s summer 2023 summer counteroffensive and proving that its forces can successfully withstand large-scale assaults by a NATO-trained, -armed and -financed military. Ukraine’s backers in the West have called for the conflict to continue until its victorious conclusion, but growing numbers of officials and politicians, as well as the US and European publics, are coming to the realization that Russia cannot be defeated militarily, and have questioned their elites’ strategy of sending additional tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and economic aid to prop up Kiev.
Rouhani emphasized that unifying powers wouldn’t solve the country’s issues.
He was referring the three branches of the government that have the same political affiliation.
Expressing skepticism, Rouhani highlighted the impracticality of expecting problems to dissipate through unified efforts.
He referenced recent disqualification of the hopefuls for the upcoming parliamentary elections following the Supreme Leader’s remarks, lamenting the impact on voter turnout.
Rouhani criticized the disqualifications, suggesting this wouldn’t increase voter engagement.
He underlined the challenges faced, expecting more confirmations to encourage wider participation.
Reports say Rouhani and former parliament speaker Ali Larijani are going to run in the upcoming parliamentary and assembly of experts elections with a joint list.
The elections will be held in March.
Roya Heshmati was detained in April for publishing her pictures on social media without wearing Islamic attire. She was initially sentenced to 13 years and nine months in prison, as well as 148 lashes, which was reduced to 74 lashes in the appeals court.
The Iranian Judiciary’s news website Mizan Online stated that the punishment, regardless of the timing, was legally lawful and in accordance with the Constitution, which asserts that observing hijab is mandatory in public places for women in the country.
However, there are those like Shahindokht Molaverdi, a former Iranian vice president for women and family affairs, who rebuked the decision to carry out the sentence on Women’s Day in Iran, which is designated on the occasion of the birthday of the Prophet’s daughter, Fatemeh Zahra.
“The opportunity the religious occasion provided for a better and more efficient understanding of the authentic religious values in order not to push the society further towards fighting with or running away from those values, was turned into a threat by a distorted way of thinking,” Molaverdi wrote in an article in Etemad daily.
Clearing ambiguities, she stressed that women should not be flogged at any other time either.
Many others have lambasted the flagging sentence as having reverse implications regarding Islamic hijab.
This is while many, particularly on social media, have lauded the judiciary in this case.
“We’ve seen these horrifying reports. We’re very concerned about the killing of journalists in Gaza. We know that the number is exceedingly high in the short amount of time that the conflict has been going on,” Florencia Soto Nino told the reporters.
Her remarks came after two more Palestinian journalists were killed in fresh Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip on Monday, pushing up the tally to 112 since Oct. 7.
Nino added the journalists risked their lives to bring the truth to everyone all over the world.
“This is increasingly hard in the conditions that they are facing over there. So, we reiterate that journalists just like any other civilians must be protected and that they should not be targeted for the job that they’re doing there.”
“We also note that, you know, misinformation about the work that they’re doing can expose them to even greater risks,” she continued.
When asked whether journalists are being deliberately targeted in Gaza, Nino said it is not verifiable at the moment.
“But what we know is that many of them have died and we have repeatedly called for their profession to be respected so that they are able to do it freely and in safety,” she added.
To a question whether Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has “greater fears” of the spread of the Gaza war as a result of the killings of senior Hamas and Hezbollah figures in Lebanon, she said it has the potential to become a more widespread conflict.
“We continue to call for restraint and for all of the actors involved to do everything in their power to prevent the escalation of the situation in the region,” Nino stated.
Guterres is in contact with several parties to try to prevent the escalation from happening, she added.
Israel has launched air and ground attacks on the enclave since Oct. 7, killing at least 23,000 Palestinians and injuring 59,000 others, according to Gaza’s health authorities, while nearly 1,200 Israelis are believed to have been killed in the Hamas attack.
The Israeli onslaught has left Gaza in ruins, with 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure damaged or destroyed, and nearly 2 million residents displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine.
The clarification on Tuesday came after one of the lawyers of the families of the victims claimed in an interview that the main suspect has been released on bail.
The Judiciary’s Media Center released a statement, noting that the suspect has been in custody since early 2020.
All the 176 on board the Ukraine flight PS752 en route to Kiev were killed after it crashed minutes after takeoff near Tehran on January 8, 2020.
Amid tensions between Tehran and Washington following the US assassination of General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq days earlier, Iran’s air defense mistook the aircraft for a military target.
“Over three months into the oppressive war against the resistant Gaza, 111 journalists and cameramen have been martyred; the shocking figure is unprecedented in history,” the minister wrote on X social media platform.
The Zionists are extremely scared of the awareness and judgment of the world, and this is the main reason for the criminal regime’s hatred and grudge towards media staff, he added.
Amirabdollahian paid tribute to “the lofty spirit of the martyrs of the media staff and offered his condolences to Wael al-Dahdouh, the Palestinian hero journalist.
Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, al-Dahdouh, who lost his wife, 7-year-old daughter, and 15-year-old son in an Israeli airstrike in October, lost another child to an Israeli air raid over the weekend.
Al-Dahdouh’s 27-year-old son, al-Dahdouh, who was also a journalist at Al Jazeera, was killed Sunday while in a car returning from an assignment along with another colleague, Mustafa Thuraya.
This is the fourth immediate family member that Wael al-Dahdouh has lost, not including his grandchild and eight other relatives who were also killed in the October airstrike.
The letter calls for the formation of a committee of experts who have the necessary authority to immediately intervene and prevent it from becoming a widespread crisis.
The letter reads, “In recent months, we have seen many cases of young doctors and medical assistants dying due to suicide, which is a source of concern. It should be noted that the frequency of suicide in this group is unfortunately several times higher than what happens in the general population of the country.”
The association has singled out “social, economic, and working conditions” as the main reasons behind the crisis, blaming “wrong decisions and policies made in the higher echelons in recent years for piling pressure on the medical staff.
The association has previously written two letters to the Iranian health ministry to raise the alarm on the issue.
Mahmood Fazel, Chairman of Iran’s Supreme Medical Council, has also warned that there are no candidates to study in certain professional medical fields, warning that failure to immediately intervene will leave healthcare centers seriously understaffed.
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