Iranian Nobel Peace Laureate Starts New Hunger Strike in Prison

The rights activist Narges Mohammadi is protesting her continued detention, her family said. She was arrested again in December after being given leave from prison for medical treatment.Narges Mohammadi in Tehran last year while on temporary leave from prison. She was released for medical treatment in 2024 before being arrested again last year.Credit...Nooshin Jafari/Middle East Images, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFeb. 5, 2026Updated 9:45 a.m. ETThe Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has begun a hunger strike in an Iranian prison in protest of what she said was her unlawful detention, according to a statement from her family released on Wednesday.Ms. Mohammadi, a prominent Iranian rights and democracy activist, has been arrested and imprisoned repeatedly on charges of threatening national security.She was on a hunger strike most recently in 2023, when her family said she was being denied medical care while in detention. Ms. Mohammadi, 53, was allowed to temporarily leave prison for treatment in 2024 but was arrested again last December.The statement said she had been on a hunger strike since Monday, protesting her continued detention, poor conditions of confinement and lack of contact with family or legal counsel. Many detainees in Iran face such conditions, it added.Ms. Mohammadi received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 for her years campaigning against government repression and for women’s rights, often using civil disobedience tactics like organized protests and sit-ins. She received the award in absentia because she was serving a 10-year sentence in Iran’s notorious Evin prison.In the statement on Wednesday, Ms. Mohammadi’s husband, Taghi Rahmani, said she suffered from several serious health conditions, including heart problems and lung complications. She also requires regular, specialized medical care after a bone graft surgery last year — treatment that her family said was denied during her current detention.“We are gravely concerned for her life,” said Kiana Rahmani, Ms. Mohammadi’s daughter and a co-president of the Narges Mohammadi Foundation, which represents her work. “She, along with all political prisoners in Iran, must be released immediately.”Ms. Mohammadi was allowed one phone call to her family after she was detained in December, the statement said, and she told them that Iranian authorities beat her so severely that she was taken twice to an emergency room. She has not been allowed to make contact with her family since, they said.At the time, the Iranian authorities did not respond to a request for comment. The general prosecutor in Mashhad, the city where she was detained, told the news agency Tasnim that Ms. Mohammedi and the other detainees were “being held in a lawful detention facility with their citizens’ rights respected” as a legal investigation was conducted.According to Ms. Mohammadi’s foundation, her family and close associates have been pressured by security agencies to refrain from sharing any information about her condition.Her reported hunger strike comes amid a severe and continuing crackdown in Iran after nationwide anti-government protests that began in late December.Authorities crushed the protests with lethal force, killing at least 6,883 people, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a rights group based in the United States. Since then, several rights groups have said that about 40,000 protesters have been arrested, many of whom they say have no legal representation or due process.Mr. Rahmani said in the statement on Wednesday that the authorities have refused to transfer his wife from Mashhad to a facility in the capital, Tehran, where her lawyers are based, “solely to maintain this tight, local control over her.” The Iranian authorities did not respond immediately to a request for comment.“They also know that if she is released, she will immediately resume her activism,” Mr. Rahmani said, adding, “Narges will never be silenced, and it is her voice that they fear most.”SKIP