The internet is a pretty critical economic tool. I'd imagine that a good portion of the reason is simply to let Iranian businesses function.

You might be right; most of the traffic is bot-driven

The more important aspect is that the regime now feels certain enough that they have killed enough of the internal opposition so that the security forces can handle rest even with open comms.

Iranian-sponsored threat actors have had network access throughout this entire conflict.

Wouldn't regime glow in the darks have open access already? You'd imagine they'd run a whitelist or something.

I'm not a fan of the Iranian government at all but this is pure Iran Derangement Syndrome. If you thought about this for half a second you'd realize that their "army of digital burglars" has had internet access the entire time. No state, and especially not one that specializes in proxy warfare, is going to intentionally cripple its actors with the highest damage to plausible deniability ratio.

> Also relatedly, Trump is now doubling down on U.S. demands and threats of more military action. This is what you do if you sense your opponent is weak. Does U.S. intelligence know something we don't?

Hasn’t he done this every week since it started? He constantly bounces between “we’ve almost got a great deal” and “we are going to ABSOLUTELY OBLITERATE IRAN1!!!1!”

There are many reasons to lie about peace being around the corner, it is the default norm. It is in part to place the blame of further conflicts on your enemies, i.e. I wanted peace but clearly they did not.

There is a conflict of narratives and one way to help push your narrative is to act like it is the reality in the ground. Unless the US is going to send in a ground army or nuke Iran then all we have at the moment is a pointless stalemate and the longer this goes on the more people will be upset at Trump and Israel for creating this situation.

Isn't it also possible that this happened to be one of the explicit pre-conditions for a treaty by the US?