Iran claims the arrest of 5 Israel Mossad agents, warns public to delete WhatsApp
There are restrictions on internet access in Iran during the war with Israel.
Chinese evacuees from Iran have shared their experiences.
Iran said on Wednesday it had detained five suspected agents of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency on charges of tarnishing the country's image online, Iranian news agencies reported.
'These mercenaries sought to sow fear among the public and tarnish the image of the sacred system of the Islamic Republic of Iran through their calculated activities online,' the Tasnim and ISNA news agencies quoted a statement from the Revolutionary Guards as saying.
They added that the arrests had been made in the western province of Lorestan.
The arrests came as Iran traded fire with Israel for a sixth day following the aerial assault on Iranian military and nuclear facilities, as well as residential areas, which it launched last week.
Iran announced on Friday that it was placing temporary restrictions on the internet for the duration of the conflict. Numerous sites and apps have since been at least partially inaccessible.
The authorities appealed to the public on Tuesday to 'minimise their use of equipment connected to the internet and to take appropriate precautions' online.
For their own safety, civil servants and their security teams have been banned from using any connected devices, including smartphones, watches and laptops during the Israeli air offensive.
State television appealed to Iranians on Tuesday to delete WhatsApp from their phones, charging that the messaging app gathers users' location and personal data and 'communicates them to the Zionist enemy'.
According to Reuters, Iran will respond to Israeli strikes 'strongly' and 'without restraint,' its ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva said on Wednesday.
'We will not show any reluctance in defending our people, security and land. We will respond seriously and strongly, without restraint,' Ali Bahreini, the ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations in Geneva, told reporters.
Peter Kollanyi/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The first Chinese evacuees from Iran have started sharing on social media their desperate efforts to reach the Islamic Republic's borders and the safety of Turkmenistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, as the Israel-Iran air war entered a sixth day.
Several thousand Chinese nationals are thought to reside in oil-rich Iran, according to state media reports highlighting Beijing's efforts to deepen strategic and commercial ties with the theocratic regime over the past two decades.
'My heart was pounding but amid the haze of war, everything became clear: I packed my bags and tried to evacuate to the embassy,' wrote a Chinese travel blogger under the alias Shuishui Crusoe, a nod to Daniel Defoe's fictional castaway, Robinson Crusoe.
The travel blogger had decided to leave after sitting through Israel's overnight bombings last Friday when the conflict began, even as the embassy told advised her to stay put.
Atta Kenare/AFP
Emboldened by news of fellow citizens who made it across to Armenia, 750km from the Iranian capital Tehran, she chose the same route, arriving by bus in the Armenian capital Yerevan on Monday, a day before China's embassy officially urged citizens to leave Iran.
China started evacuating its citizens from Tehran to Turkmenistan by overland bus on Tuesday, a distance of 1 150km, state-run China News Service reported on Wednesday.
More than 700 Chinese nationals have been transferred to places of safety and more than 1 000 more are in the process of being transferred, China's Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday.
While the embassy emphasised evacuation, some other Chinese netizens still in Iran shared video compilations showing an orderly scenario of well-stocked grocery shops and fruit stalls, with only a couple of clips of large purchases of bottled water.
Most Chinese in Iran are engineers who moved there to work for Chinese firms that have invested just under $5 billion in the country since 2007 - primarily in its oil sector - according to data from the American Enterprise Institute think tank.
If the regime in Tehran is severely weakened or replaced, Beijing loses a key diplomatic foothold in a region long dominated by the US but vital to President Xi Jinping's flagship Belt and Road initiative and its aim to link the world's second-largest economy with Europe and the Gulf.
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