Iran has warned that it is ‘ready for war’ after US President Donald Trump threatened to ‘hit them at levels that they’ve never been hit before’ as anti-government protests enter a third week.
It comes as US-based Human Rights Activist News Agency (HRANA) said nearly 500 protesters and 48 security personnel in Iran had died amid the Islamic Republic’s bloody crackdown targeting demonstrators.
‘It’s like a warzone, the streets are full of blood,’ an Iranian told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme.
Speaking aboard Air Force One on Sunday night, Trump threatened to intervene, saying: ‘The military is looking at it, and we’re looking at some very strong options.’
Asked about Iran’s threats of retaliation, he said: ‘If they do that, we will hit them at levels that they’ve never been hit before.’
Iran’s Foreign Minister Araqchi hit back at the comments, saying: ‘We are ready for war but also for dialogue.’
He added that the US president’s warning against Tehran of action should protests turn bloody motivated ‘terrorists’ to target demonstrators and security forces in order to invite foreign intervention.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to use lethal force against the Iranian government for its violent efforts to suppress protestors, saying Iran ‘is in big trouble’ on Friday.
‘I’ve made the statement very strongly that if they start killing people like they have in the past, we will get involved,’ he told reporters.
Tehran’s attorney general, Mohammad Movahedi Azad, hit back at the threat, warning on Saturday that anyone taking part in protests will be considered an ‘enemy of God,’ a death-penalty charge.
Rhetoric only escalated when Mohammad Baagher Qalibaf, the hard-liner speaker of the Parliament of Iran, said Israel and ‘all American military centres, bases and ships in the region will be our legitimate targets’ in the event of an attack on Tehran.
‘Things here are very, very bad. A lot of our friends have been killed,’ the anonymous Iranian woman told the BBC.
‘They’re taking away bodies in trucks, everyone is frightened tonight. They’re carrying out a massacre here – it’s officially a massacre.’
Almost 200 body bags have been seen in footage from a morgue near the Iranian capital as protests continue.
Another 10,600 people have been detained over the fortnight of unrest, HRANA said.
The Iranian government has imposed an internet shutdown since Thursday.
The protests mark the largest in Iran since a nationwide uprising in 2022, sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman who was detained by morality police for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly.
Trump said on Sunday that he would speak to tech billionaire Elon Musk, owner of company SpaceX which operates Starlink, about resuming internet access in Iran.
‘He’s very good at that kind of thing, he’s got a very good company,’ the US president said.
Speaking to foreign diplomats in Tehran, Foreign Minister Araghchi claimed ‘the situation has come under total control’ after violence spiked over the weekend.
The Qatar-funded Al Jazeera satellite news network, which has been allowed to work despite the internet being cut off in the country, carried his remarks.
On Sunday, Trump said Iran had proposed negotiations after his threat to strike the Islamic Republic over its bloody crackdown targeting demonstrators.
The US president and his national security team have been weighing a range of potential responses against Iran including cyber-attacks and direct strikes by the US or Israel, according to two people familiar with internal White House discussions who were not authorised to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The president will be briefed on specific options on Tuesday and could opt for military action.
He said his administration was in talks to set up a meeting with Tehran, but cautioned he may have to act first as reports of the death toll in Iran mount and the government continues to arrest protesters.
‘I think they’re tired of being beat up by the United States,’ Trump said. ‘Iran wants to negotiate.
‘The meeting is being set up, but we may have to act because of what’s happening before the meeting. But a meeting is being set up. Iran called, they want to negotiate.’
There was no immediate acknowledgement from Iran of the offering for a meeting.
The offer came after the foreign minister of Oman – long an interlocutor between Washington and Tehran – travelled to Iran this weekend.
It also remains unclear just what Iran could promise, particularly as Trump has set strict demands over its nuclear program and its ballistic missile arsenal, which Tehran insists is crucial for its national defense.
Meanwhile Monday, Iran called for pro-government demonstrators to head to the streets in support of the theocracy as Iranian state television aired chants from the crowd, who shouted: ‘Death to America!’ and ‘Death to Israel!’
The regime subsequently managed to draw tens of thousands of pro-government demonstrators to the streets in show of power.
The massive ongoing US military deployment to the Caribbean is a factor that the Pentagon and Trump’s national security planners must consider.
With the internet down in Iran and phone lines cut off, gauging the demonstrations from abroad has grown more difficult while Iran’s government has not offered overall casualty figures.
Those abroad fear the information blackout is emboldening hard-liners within Iran’s security services to launch a bloody crackdown.
Protesters flooded the streets in the country’s capital and its second-largest city on Saturday night into Sunday morning.
Online videos purported to show more demonstrations Sunday night into Monday, with a Tehran official acknowledging them in state media.
The threat to strike the US military and Israel came during a parliamentary speech by Qalibaf, the speaker of the body who has run for the presidency in the past.
He directly threatened Israel, calling it ‘the occupied territory’.
‘We do not consider ourselves limited to reacting after the action and will act based on any objective signs of a threat,’ he added.
Politicians rushed the dais in parliament, shouting: ‘Death to America!’
It remains unclear how serious Iran is about launching a strike, particularly after its air defences were destroyed during the 12-day war in June with Israel.
Any decision to go to war would rest with Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Last night, he issued a direct threat to Trump on X, saying the US president would be ‘overthrown’.
‘That father figure who sits there with arrogance and pride, passing judgment on the entire world, he too should know that usually the tyrants and oppressors of the world, such as Pharaoh and Nimrod and Reza Khan and Mohammad Reza and the likes of them, when they were at the peak of their pride, were overthrown,’ he wrote in Persian.
‘Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before,’ Trump wrote on social media on Saturday. ‘The USA stands ready to help!!!’
The US military has said in the Mideast it is ‘postured with forces that span the full range of combat capability to defend our forces, our partners and allies and US interests’.
Iran targeted US forces at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in June, while the US Navy’s Mideast-based 5th Fleet is stationed in the island kingdom of Bahrain.
The USS Gerald R Ford, the largest and most sophisticated aircraft carrier, left the Mediterranean in November for the Caribbean to focus on Venezuela.
America has six warships, including three guided-missile destroyers which were stationed in the Gulf as of January 5, according to a tracker from the US Naval Institute.
Israel, meanwhile, is ‘watching closely’ the situation between the US and Iran, said an Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to not being authorised to speak to journalists.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio overnight on topics including Iran, the official added.
‘The people of Israel, the entire world, are in awe of the tremendous heroism of the citizens of Iran,’ said Netanyahu, a longtime Iran hawk.
At the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV mentioned Iran as a place ‘where ongoing tensions continue to claim many lives’, adding that: ‘I hope and pray that dialogue and peace may be patiently nurtured in pursuit of the common good of the whole of society.’
While the demonstrations began in late December in response to a currency crisis, they have since spread and grown in scale as Iranians demand wholescale changes to Tehran’s authoritarian leadership.
Khamenei said on Friday that the government would ‘not back down’ in the face of the large-scale unrest.
Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s deposed shah and a figure of Iran’s opposition in exile, said he was in favour of the US intervening to support of the mass protest movement against Khamenei’s theocratic rule.
‘They know that you’re not going to throw them under the bus, as has happened before. This is why they are empowered – by the hope that you have their back,’ he said in an interview on the Fox News programme ‘Sunday Morning Futures’, addressing Trump directly.
‘We need to cut the snake’s head off for good so it can no longer be a threat to Iranian interests, to American interests, to regional interests. And the only solution is to make sure this regime goes down for good and the Iranian people can liberate themselves,’ he said.
Born in Tehran in 1960 and once the country’s crown prince, Pahlavi, 65, has lived in exile since the 1979 revolution.
It was that revolution that ousted his father, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and brought in the rule of the Islamic Republic.
Asked whether he wanted the American military to ‘take out Khamenei,’ he said: ‘The people of Iran have responded and reacted positively to a promise of intervention.’
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Sunday promised the government would ‘sit and listen’ to the population’s concerns, but also blamed ‘rioters’ and the US and Israel for stoking the unrest.
‘It is our responsibility to solve their concerns,’ he said during an interview on Iranian television. ‘But the higher responsibility is to not allow a group of rioters to come and destroy the entire society. These are not people. They are not from this country.’
In an effort to crackdown on the demonstrations, police sent the public a text message that warned: ‘Given the presence of terrorist groups and armed individuals in some gatherings last night and their plans to cause death, and the firm decision to not tolerate any appeasement and to deal decisively with the rioters, families are strongly advised to take care of their youth and teenagers.’
Another text, claiming to come from the intelligence arm of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, also directly warned people not to take part in protests.
‘Dear parents, in view of the enemy’s plan to increase the level of naked violence and the decision to kill people, … refrain from being on the streets and gathering in places involved in violence, and inform your children about the consequences of cooperating with terrorist mercenaries, which is an example of treason against the country,’ the text warned.
Rubina Aminian, a 23-year-old student, was shot in the head ‘from close range’ during the anti-government protests on Thursday.
‘Sources close to Rubina’s family, citing eyewitnesses, told Iran Human Rights that the young Kurdish woman from Marivan was shot from close range from behind, with the bullet striking her head,’ the group said in a statement.
Aminian attended Shariati College in Iran’s capital, Tehran, where she studied textile and fashion design.
After leaving college, she joined the protest where she was killed.
‘After much struggle, Rubina’s family eventually managed to retrieve her body and return to Kermanshah.
‘However, upon arrival, they found that intelligence forces had surrounded their home and that they were not allowed to bury her.’
The family was ‘forced to bury her body along the road’ between Kermanshah and nearby Kamyaran, the group aded.
On December 28, protests broke out in two major markets in downtown Tehran, after the Iranian rial plunged to 1.42 million to the US dollar, a new record low, compounding inflationary pressure and pushing up the prices of food and other daily necessities.
The government had raised prices for nationally subsidised gasoline in early December, increasing discontent.
A day later, Central Bank head Mohammad Reza Farzin resigned as the protests in Tehran spread to other cities, while police fired tear gas to disperse demonstrations in the capital.
Unrest continued to spread to include more cities as well as several university campuses.
Meanwhile, President Pezeshkian met with a group of business leaders to listen to their demands and pledged his administration would ‘not spare any effort for solving problems’ with the economy.
On December 31, Iran appointed Abdolnasser Hemmati as the country’s new central bank governor.
Officials in southern Iran said that protests in the city of Fasa turned violent after crowds broke into the governor’s office and injured police officers.
The protests’ first fatalities were officially reported on January 1, with authorities saying at least seven people had been killed.
The most intense violence appeared to be in Azna, a city in Iran’s Lorestan province, where videos posted online purport to show objects in the street ablaze and gunfire echoing as people shouted: ‘Shameless! Shameless!’
The semiofficial Fars news agency reported three people were killed as other protesters were understood to be killed in Bakhtiari and Isfahan provinces.
A day later, President Trump raised the stakes, writing on his Truth Social platform that if Iran ‘violently kills peaceful protesters,’ the United States ‘will come to their rescue’.
The warning, only months after American forces bombed Iranian nuclear sites, included the assertion, without elaboration, that: ‘We are locked and loaded and ready to go.’
Protests, meantime, expand to reach more than 100 locations in 22 of Iran’s 31 provinces.
As protests expanded again to more than 170 locations in 25 provinces, at least 15 people were killed and 580 arrested, with Khamenei warning: ‘Rioters must be put in their place.’
Protesters conducted a sit-in at Tehran’s Grand Bazaar on January 6, until security forces dispersed them using tear gas, as demonstrations reached over 280 locations in 27 of Iran’s 31 provinces.
Following a call from Iran’s exiled crown prince, a mass of people shouted from their windows and took to the streets in an overnight protest on January 8.
The government responded by blocking the internet and international telephone calls, in a bid to cut off the country of 85 million from outside influence.
Iran signalled a crackdown is coming, but protesters continue to demonstrate even as the death toll rises.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Monday that Iran’s use of ‘disproportionate and brutal violence’ against protesters was ‘a sign of weakness’.
‘We condemn this violence in the strongest possible terms,’ he said during a visit to India.
The German leader added: ‘This violence is not an expression of strength, but rather a sign of weakness. This violence must end.’
Canada echoed the message in a post on X.
‘Canada strongly condemns the continued killings of protesters in Iran. The Iranian regime must halt its horrific repression and intimidation and respect the human rights of its citizens. Canada stands with the brave people of Iran.’
Speaking to LBC, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said his force is ‘attuned’ to the threat posed by Iran but would not be drawn on whether security has been stepped up for teams which disrupted plots linked to Tehran.
‘Our counter-terrorism teams within the national effort led from Scotland Yard have disrupted around 20 kidnap and threat-to-life plots linked to Iran over the last couple of years in our work with MI5,’ he said.
‘The other policing impact at the moment is that, clearly, there are understandably lots of Iranians in London who are angry with the regime and are protesting outside the embassy and that has generated some quite big policing operations over the weekend.
‘World events always play out in London, I can understand why that is, but we’ll see what happens in Iran. I’m not an expert in geopolitics but I do see it play out in the streets of London.’
He added: ‘Our counter-terrorism teams are constantly reprioritising across different threats, I’m not going to talk about live threats today. But we are attuned to the threat that Iran has posed for the last two years and we’re also dealing with protests outside the embassy.’
