In the wake of the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, the regime appears to be turning inward — escalating repression with chilling speed. 

According to Kasra Aarabi, director of IRGC research at United Against Nuclear Iran, the Islamic Republic is accelerating toward what he said is a ‘North Korea-style model of isolation and control.’

‘We’re witnessing a kind of domestic isolation that will have major consequences for the Iranian people,’ Aarabi told Fox News Digital. ‘The regime has always been totalitarian, but the level of suppression now is unprecedented. It’s unlike anything we’ve seen before.’

A source inside Iran confirmed to Fox News Digital that ‘the repression has become terrifying.’

Aarabi, who maintains direct lines of contact in Iran, described a country under siege by its own rulers. In Tehran, he described how citizens are stopped at random, their phones confiscated and searched. ‘If you have content deemed pro-Israel or mocking the regime, you disappear,’ he said. ‘People are now leaving their phones at home or deleting everything before they step outside.’

This new wave of paranoia and fear, he explained, mirrors tactics seen in North Korea — where citizens vanish without explanation and information is tightly controlled. During the recent conflict, Iran’s leadership imposed a total internet blackout to isolate the population, blocking Israeli evacuation alerts, and pushed propaganda that framed Israel as targeting civilians indiscriminately.

‘It was a perverse objective,’ Aarabi said, adding, ‘They deliberately cut communications to instill fear and manipulate public perception. For four days, not a single message went through. Even Israeli evacuation alerts didn’t reach their targets.’

The regime’s aim, he said, was twofold: to keep people off the streets and erode the surprising bond that had formed between Iranians and Israelis. ‘At the start of the war, many Iranians welcomed the strikes,’ Aarabi noted. ‘They knew Israel was targeting the IRGC — the very forces responsible for suppressing and killing their own people. But once the internet was cut and fear set in, some began to question what was happening.’

Dr. Afshon Ostovar, a leading Iran scholar and author of ‘Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards,’ said domestic repression remains the regime’s most reliable strategy for survival. 

‘Repressing the people at home is easy. That’s something they can do. So it’s not unlikely that Iran could become more insular, more autocratic, more repressive — and more similar to, let’s say, a North Korea — than what it is today. That might be the only way they see to preserve the regime: by really tightening the screws on the Iranian people, to ensure that the Iranian population doesn’t try to rise up and topple the regime,’ he told Fox News Digital.

Inside the regime’s power structure, the fallout from the war is just as severe. Aarabi said that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is facing an internal crisis of trust and an imminent purge. ‘These operations couldn’t have taken place without infiltration at the highest levels,’ he said. ‘There’s immense pressure now to clean house.’

The next generation of IRGC officers — those who joined after 2000 — are younger, more radical and deeply indoctrinated. Over half of their training is now ideological. Aarabi said that these newer factions have begun turning on senior commanders, accusing them of being too soft on Israel or even collaborating with Mossad.

‘In a twist of irony, Khamenei created these extreme ideological ranks to consolidate power — and now they’re more radical than he is,’ Aarabi said. ‘He’s struggling to control them.’

A purge is likely, along with the rise of younger, less experienced commanders with far higher risk tolerance — a shift that could make the IRGC more volatile both domestically and internationally. With Iran’s conventional military doctrine in ruins, terrorism may become its primary lever of influence.

‘The regime’s three pillars — militias, ballistic missiles, and its nuclear program — have all been decapitated or severely degraded,’ Aarabi said. ‘That leaves only asymmetric warfare: soft-target terrorism with plausible deniability.’

Despite the regime’s brutal turn inward, Aarabi insists this is a sign of weakness, not strength. ‘If the Islamic Republic were confident, it wouldn’t need to crush its people this way,’ he said. ‘It’s acting out of fear. But until the regime’s suppressive apparatus is dismantled, the streets will remain silent — and regime change remains unlikely.’

Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman secretly met with President Donald Trump and other key officials in the White House on Thursday to discuss de-escalation efforts with Iran, multiple sources confirmed with Fox News.

Khalid, also known as KBS, is the younger brother of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Multiple sources told Fox News Channel’s chief political anchor Bret Baier about the meeting.

According to sources, the talks included discussions about de-escalation with Iran and getting to the negotiating table.

The talks were also reportedly about ending the war in Gaza and negotiating the release of the remaining hostages – whether dead or alive – and about working toward peace in the Middle East.

Although the talks were not exclusively about the possibility of normalization with Israel, sources said the conversation dealt with steps that needed to occur to get there.

Sources also said, ‘there was progress and optimism on all fronts.’

The Saudis are in the process of finalizing a defense and trade deal with the U.S., and the message shared between the two allies, sources added, is that they see eye-to-eye on all issues.

The meeting comes days after Trump said other nations have suggested they would like to join the Abraham Accords amid recent Middle East shakeups that saw Israel and the U.S. inhibit Iran’s nuclear ambitions during what has been dubbed the ’12-Day War.’

The Abraham Accords, which sought to normalize relations between Israel, Sunni Gulf States and North African countries, was signed at the White House during the first Trump administration in September 2020.

US special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff said on June 25 that expanding the accords is one of the president’s ‘key objectives’ and predicted that the administration will have some ‘big announcements’ on countries coming into the accords soon.

Last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt named Syria as one of the nations the president was keen to join, noting their historic meeting in Saudi Arabia earlier in the year.

One of the largest Hebrew-language outlets, Israel Hayom, reported Tuesday that Israeli National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi believes those countries are Syria and Lebanon as the top Middle East states who could join the Abraham Accords.

In May, Trump asked Syrian President al-Sharaa to fully normalize relations with Israel in exchange for sanctions relief. 

‘The barriers of entry for expanding the Abraham Accords are incredibly low. It will not surprise me if President Trump expands the Accords within his second term,’ Robert Greenway, former senior director for the National Security Counciland key architect of the Abraham Accords, told Maria Bartiromo, on ‘Mornings With Maria’ on FOX Business.

After the completion of the Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan in 2020, there was a growing expectation among U.S. officials and Middle East experts that Saudi Arabia would follow suit.

In February, Fox News Digital reported that Trump administration officials said the White House was seeking an expansion of the Abraham Accords.

The Biden administration faced criticism for failing to expand the Abraham Accords and for picking fights with states who made peace with Israel as part of the landmark agreement.

Fox News Digital’s Benjamin Weinthal, Morgan Phillips and Taylor Penley contributed to this report.

The Supreme Court ended its term last week, but the justices aren’t done yet, partly due to a legal blitz President Donald Trump has strategically deployed in his second term, one that’s proven surprisingly effective in advancing his sweeping agenda.

Lawyers for the Trump administration filed their 20th emergency application to the Supreme Court Thursday in just a 23-week period. 

The dizzying pace of applications comes as the administration looks to advance some of Trump’s sweeping policy actions. And, in many cases, the court’s 6-3 majority has given the administration the green light to proceed. 

The high court has ruled in Trump’s favor in the majority of emergency applications, allowing the administration to proceed with its ban on transgender service members in the military, its termination of millions of dollars in Education Department grants and its firing of probationary employees across the federal government, among many other actions.

Like most emergency orders, the rulings are often unsigned, giving little indication what the justices might be thinking.

Emergency applications — and the Supreme Court’s responses — aren’t meant to offer lasting relief. But Trump has found success using a ‘move fast and break things’ strategy to push key requests through the court’s so-called ‘shadow’ docket.

For context, Trump has filed more emergency applications in five months than his predecessors did in years. Former President Joe Biden submitted just 19 over his entire term, while presidents Obama and George W. Bush filed only eight combined during their time in office.

In the interim, the strategy has allowed him to enforce many of the sweeping executive orders he signed upon taking office. These orders were met with hundreds of lawsuits across the country and blocked by many lower courts, prompting the administration to appeal them, again and again, through the federal judiciary. 

For now, those near-term wins have energized Trump allies, allowing them to press forward with a blitz of executive actions and claim ‘victory,’ however temporary. The approach allows Trump to advance major policy priorities without relying on a slow-moving Congress.

North Korean officials accused the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) of running ‘an absurd smear campaign’ after announcing that it had unraveled several schemes by the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK) to fund the regime through remote information technology work for U.S. companies.

Earlier this week, the DOJ said North Korean actors were helped by individuals in the U.S., China, the United Emirates and Taiwan to obtain employment with over 100 U.S. companies, including Fortune 500 companies.

The scheme allegedly involved the workers getting laptops from the companies that hired them and allowing remote North Korean IT workers to remotely access the computers. In another scheme, North Korean IT workers used false identities to gain employment with a blockchain research and development company in Atlanta, Georgia, and steal over $900,000 in virtual currency.

As part of its announcement about the North Korean scheme, the DOJ unsealed a five-count indictment against Zhenxing Wang, a U.S. national living in New Jersey, who has since been arrested.

Wang and his co-conspirators, the DOJ said, obtained remote IT work with U.S. companies and generated over $5 million in revenue.

Also charged in the indictment are Chinese nationals Jing Bin Huang, Baoyu Zhou, Tong Yuze, Yongzhe Xu, Ziyou Yuan and Zhenbang Zhou. Taiwanese nationals Mengting Liu and Enchia Liu were also charged in the indictment.

Also indicted was U.S. national Kejia ‘Tony’ Wang, also of New Jersey, who was charged separately.

North Korean news agency KCNA reported that a spokesperson for the DPRK Foreign Ministry lambasted the U.S. judicial system for its actions against DPRK citizens on the suspicion of a cybercrime.

‘The recent incident is an absurd smear campaign and grave violation of sovereignty aimed at tarnishing the image of our state as it is a continuation of the hostile move of the successive U.S. administrations that have talked much about the non-existent ‘cyber threat’ from the DPRK,’ the spokesperson reportedly said. ‘The Foreign Ministry of the DPRK expresses serious concern over the U.S. judicial authorities’ provocation which is threatening and encroaching on the security, rights and interests of our citizens by fabricating the groundless ‘cyber’ drama, and strongly denounces and rejects it.’

The spokesperson accused the U.S. of creating ‘international cyberspace instability,’ and not the DPRK.

‘The U.S. has long been posing a constant threat to the cybersecurity of the DPRK and other sovereign states by making cyber space a scene of battle and abusing the cyber issue as a political weapon to tarnish the image of other countries and impair the exercise of their legitimate rights,’ the spokesperson said. 

‘The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has the right to take a proper and proportionate countermeasure to thoroughly protect the security and rights of its citizens from the judicial enforcement for a sinister political purpose, and to call to strict legal account the outsiders who took malicious action,’ the spokesperson concluded.

The DOJ said the indictment alleges that from 2021 and through most of 2024, the defendants and other co-conspirators compromised the identities of over 80 people in the U.S. to obtain remote jobs at more than 100 companies. As a result, the victim companies incurred legal fees, computer network remediation costs and other damages and losses to the tune of at least $3 million.

Kejia and Zhenxing, along with at least four other U.S. facilitators, allegedly helped overseas IT workers with various parts of the scheme.

Kejia and Zhenxing allegedly established shell companies with websites and financial accounts to make it appear as though the overseas IT workers were affiliated with legitimate businesses in the U.S. Once established, the two allegedly received money from U.S. companies, and the funds were transferred to co-conspirators overseas.

In exchange for their services, Kejia, Zhenxing and the other four conspirators in the U.S. received at least $696,000 from the IT workers.

The DOJ said one of the companies the schemers allegedly accessed data from was a defense contractor that develops artificial intelligence-powered equipment and technology. By accessing the company’s data, the schemers were privy to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), the DOJ said.

The DOJ also announced that the FBI and Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) seized 17 web domains used as part of the scheme, along with 29 financial accounts holding tens of thousands of dollars, used to launder revenue for the North Korean regime.

The DOJ unveiled another part of the scheme, which resulted in a five-count wire fraud and money laundering indictment against four North Korean nationals: Kim Kwang Jin, Kang Tae Bok, Jong Pong Ju and Change Nam II.

The suspects are accused of scheming to steal virtual currency from two companies, with a value of over $900,000 at the time of the thefts, and to launder the proceeds.

All four nationals, the DOJ said, are at large and wanted by the FBI.