TEHRAN — Iran’s parliament opened an emergency session on Tuesday to confront a collapsing currency, soaring food prices and the first audible calls from inside the system for an accounting of the seven-week war with Israel, just six days into a ceasefire that has stopped the missiles but not the political reckoning gathering in their wake.

The Majlis, recalled from a scheduled recess by Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, met under unusual conditions. Several committee rooms remained closed for damage assessments after Israeli strikes earlier in the month, and lawmakers from the northern provinces arrived by overland convoy because of the partial closure of Mehrabad Airport’s military side. By midmorning, the rial had weakened past 1,070,000 to the dollar on Tehran’s free market, a drop of nearly 18 percent since the ceasefire took effect on April 15 and roughly 40 percent since the war began on March 1, according to currency dealers in the Ferdowsi district.

“We did not lose this war on the battlefield. We are losing it at the bakery and the pharmacy, and the people are watching,” said Reza Pourebrahimi, chair of the parliamentary Economic Commission and a conservative ally of the speaker, in remarks from the floor that state broadcaster IRIB carried in full. He called for the immediate publication of a war-cost audit and for the dismissal of the governor of the Central Bank of Iran, Mohammad Reza Farzin.

Tuesday’s session marked the most direct public criticism from within the political establishment since the war began, and the first signal that the careful unity displayed by Iran’s leadership through the conflict has begun to fray now that the shooting has stopped. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has not been seen in public since an April 14 address from an undisclosed location, was reported by people close to his office to be receiving briefings at a secured residence north of the capital. State television did not air any new footage of him on Tuesday.

President Masoud Pezeshkian, whose reformist administration entered the war with diminished authority and emerged with even less, addressed the parliament for roughly forty minutes. He defended the decision to accept the Islamabad framework and the prisoner exchange in Doha as “necessary to preserve the country itself,” and warned against what he called “the temptation to look for traitors when the honest answer is that the cost was high and the choice was real.” He confirmed that the cabinet had approved an emergency draw of $4.8 billion from the National Development Fund to stabilize subsidized food and medicine imports, and said an additional $2.1 billion would be requested through a supplementary budget.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who briefed lawmakers in a closed session before the public sitting, told them that no sanctions relief had yet been formally agreed in Islamabad and that any phased relaxation of secondary oil sanctions would be tied to verification steps on enrichment, according to two parliamentarians who attended the briefing and spoke on condition of anonymity to describe its contents. One of the lawmakers said Araghchi had cautioned that the relief, when it came, would be “calibrated and reversible — a tap, not a flood.”

The economic backdrop is the most acute of any moment since the 2019 protests. The Statistical Centre of Iran reported overnight that headline inflation had risen to 64.2 percent year-on-year in the Iranian month ending April 20, with food and beverage inflation running above 90 percent. Bread queues have lengthened in working-class districts of Tehran, Mashhad and Tabriz; the union representing pharmacy owners said on Monday that 27 percent of essential medicines were now unavailable through official channels. Damage to the Abadan and Bandar Abbas refineries during the war has cut domestic gasoline output by an estimated 38 percent, forcing the government to lean on emergency imports financed partly through ruble-denominated swap lines with Russia.

“What we are seeing is not yet a political crisis in the regime-change sense, but it is the beginning of an accountability conversation inside a system that does not usually allow one,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. “The interesting question is whether Khamenei lets the parliament absorb the heat, or whether he steps out and reasserts a unifying narrative. Both carry risks for him.”

Outside the Majlis on Baharestan Square, several hundred people gathered through the morning, most of them holding handwritten placards demanding the publication of the war’s casualty figures. Iran has not released an official death toll. The Health Ministry’s own count, leaked last week to the Persian-language outlet IranWire, put Iranian fatalities at 4,180 through April 14, of whom roughly 1,900 were members of the armed forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The protest was monitored by uniformed police but, according to journalists at the scene, was not dispersed.

The Revolutionary Guard issued a short statement through its Sepah News portal warning against “any attempt to exploit the suffering of the people for the agenda of the enemy” and said it remained committed to the leadership of the supreme leader and the framework established in Islamabad. The statement notably did not name any domestic political figure or faction, an omission that several Tehran-based analysts said suggested internal disagreement over how, or whether, to push back on the Majlis criticism.

International reaction was muted. A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States was “watching the internal Iranian conversation closely but has no interest in becoming a character in it.” Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry, through a spokesman, said the kingdom remained committed to the Islamabad framework and to the upcoming reconstruction donor conference, which it confirmed would convene in Riyadh on May 6. European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, asked at a Luxembourg briefing whether Tehran’s instability worried her, said she was “more worried about a region that does not address its economic wounds than about a parliament that finally feels free to do its job.”

Ghalibaf adjourned the session in the late afternoon without a vote on the proposed audit, saying he would convene the relevant committees on Wednesday morning. He told reporters that the parliament would “speak with one voice when it can, and many voices when it must,” and that further announcements on the central bank governorship and the supplementary budget would be made before the end of the week.