The street will be name Khiaban-e Rachel Corrie, after the 23-year-old American woman who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to stop it from destroying a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip in 2003.
The report in the daily Hamshahri failed to say what street was being re-named after Corrie. Nor did it say why the City Council decided to act now, eight years after Corrie’s death embarrassed the Israeli state.
Before the revolution, several Tehran streets were named after prominent Americans, including Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy. Those streets were swiftly renamed after the revolution.
Few streets in Tehran are any longer named after foreigners The exceptions are those named for Bobby Sands, a member of the Irish Republican Army who died in a British prison while on a hunger strike in 1981, Edward Brown, a British orientalist known for his work on Iranian history, and Khalid Islambouli, who assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981.