Dual US-Iranian citizen imprisoned in Tehran for 2012 trip to Israel

Kamran Hekmati’s family pleads for his release as he battles bladder cancer in Evin Prison.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

An Iranian court sentenced a Jewish man with dual American and Iranian citizenship to four years in jail in August for having visited Israel over a decade ago, The New York Times reported for the first time Thursday.

Kamran Hekmati, 70, was born in Iran but emigrated to the United States when he was 13, settling in New York.

The jeweler went to see family in the Islamic Republic in May and was arrested for having celebrated his son’s bar mitzvah in Israel in 2012, as visiting the Jewish state is a crime in the Islamic Republic.

A relative told NBC News that the arrest was made in July after the authorities interrogated Hekmati several times in a relative’s home.

The interrogations took place soon after Israel’s 12-day air war with Iran in June, in which the IDF destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile production programs with the aid of the United States.

His sentence was reduced to two years in September, when Iran changed its legal code, reducing the consequences for visiting Israel to two years and applying it retroactively to Hekmati’s case.

Family members, who all spoke anonymously for fear of Iranian retaliation against their elderly relative, are asking for Hekmati’s release on humanitarian grounds, as he is battling bladder cancer and is in poor health.

He is being kept in Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison.

When reached, the State Department would not comment on the case, citing privacy concerns.

Instead, its spokesperson issued a call for American citizens not to visit Iran because of the very real dangers involved, saying, “The Iranian regime has a long history of unjustly and wrongfully detaining other countries’ citizens.”

It is widely believed that Tehran does so in order to have bargaining chips that it could use to get their agents out of Western custody or achieve the release of millions – or even billions – of dollars in accounts that had been frozen in such countries.

Just last week, Tehran freed a French couple imprisoned for three years on false claims that they had spied for France and Israel, in exchange for an Iranian woman detained in Paris since February on charges of online advocacy and incitement to terrorism.

“Anyone with a U.S. connection, including dual U.S.-Iranian nationals, is at significant risk of questioning, arrest and detention in Iran,” the spokesperson added. “We continue to engage with allies and partners on this issue and on cases of unjust detention in Iran in general.”

There are at least three other Americans who are currently being held against their will in Iran.

Two are women — one of whom was also imprisoned in Evin after the Israeli airstrikes, and another who had been jailed last December but then released, yet is not being allowed to leave the country, according to her lawyer.

The third, Reza Valizadeh, is a journalist who had worked for Radio Farda, the Persian-language department of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He has been detained since mid-2024.

He had previously written on X that Iranian family members had been arrested as a way of pressuring him to return to Iran.