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People gathered in the streets of Tehran on Thursday evening, witnesses said, marking a new escalation of ongoing protests in Iran after a call from exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi for a mass demonstration. Access to the internet and phone lines in Iran was cut immediately after the protests began.
The protests represented the first test of whether the Iranian public could be influenced by Pahlavi, whose fatally ill father, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, fled the country just before the 1979 Islamic Revolution and died in exile in 1980.
The demonstrations included chants of support for the Shah, which would have carried a death sentence in the past but now underscore the anger fueling protests that have begun over Iran’s struggling economy.
On Thursday, protests that took place on Wednesday in cities and rural villages across Iran continued. Other markets and bazaars closed their doors in support of the protests.
So far, 41 people have been killed in the violence surrounding the protests, while more than 2,270 others have been arrested, according to the US news agency Human Rights Activists News Agency.
The intensifying protests are increasing pressure on Iran’s civilian government and its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
CloudFlare, an internet company, and advocacy group NetBlocks reported the internet outage, both attributing it to Iranian government interference. Attempts to connect landlines and cell phones from Dubai to Iran failed to connect.
Such outages have in the past been followed by intense government crackdowns.
Meanwhile, the protests themselves remained largely leaderless. It remains unclear exactly what impact Pahlavi’s call will have on the upcoming protests.
“The lack of a viable alternative has undermined past protests in Iran,” wrote Nate Swanson of the Washington-based Atlantic Council, which studies Iran.
“There are perhaps a thousand Iranian dissident activists who, if given the opportunity, could become respected statesmen, as Labor leader Lech Walesa did in Poland at the end of the Cold War. But until now, the Iranian security apparatus has arrested, persecuted and exiled all of the country’s potential transformational leaders.”
Thursday protests gather at home and in the streets
“Great Iranian nation, the eyes of the world are on you. Take to the streets and, as a united front, shout out your demands,” Pahlavi said in a statement. “I warn the Islamic Republic, its leader and the [Revolutionary Guard] that the world and [President Donald Trump] are watching you closely. The repression of the people will not go unanswered. »
Pahlavi had called for protests on Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m. local time. When the clock struck, Tehran neighborhoods erupted in chants, witnesses said.
Chants included “Death to the dictator!” » and “Death to the Islamic Republic!” Others praised the shah, shouting: “This is the last battle! Pahlavi will return! Thousands of people were visible in the streets.
Pahlavi had said he would propose other projects depending on the response to his appeal. Its support for and from Israel has drawn criticism in the past – particularly after Israel’s 12-day war against Iran in June.
Protesters have shouted in support of the Shah during some demonstrations, but it is unclear whether this is in support of Pahlavi himself or a desire to return to a time before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Iranian officials appeared to take the planned protests seriously. The radical newspaper Kayhan published a video online claiming that security forces would use drones to identify participants.
Iranian officials made no acknowledgment of the scale of the protests that raged in many places on Thursday, even before the 8 p.m. demonstration. However, there are reports of injuries or deaths of security officers.
The legal Mizan news agency reported that a police colonel was fatally stabbed in a town outside Tehran, while the semi-official Fars news agency said gunmen killed two members of the security forces and wounded 30 others in a shootout in the town of Lordegan, in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province.
A deputy governor of Iran’s Khorasan Razavi province told Iranian state television that an attack on a police station killed five people Wednesday evening in Chenaran, about 700 kilometers northeast of Tehran.
On Thursday evening, the Revolutionary Guards said two members of their forces had been killed in Kermanshah.
Iran assesses Trump’s threat
Iran has faced a series of nationwide protests in recent years. As sanctions tightened and Iran struggled after the 12-day war, its currency, the rial, collapsed in December, with one U.S. dollar now costing about 1.4 million rials. Protests began soon after, with demonstrators chanting against Iran’s theocracy.
It remains unclear why the Iranian authorities have not yet severely cracked down on the protesters. Trump warned last week that if Tehran “violently killed peaceful protesters,” America would “come to their rescue.”
WATCH | Trump says US is ‘ready to go’ as Iran protests intensify:
US President Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, warning Iran that if it “violently kills peaceful protesters,” the United States “will come to their rescue.” An Iranian official later accused the United States of stoking the protests, motivated in part by the collapse of the Iranian currency.
Trump’s comments prompted a fresh rebuke from Iran’s Foreign Ministry, which highlighted the “long history of criminal interventions” in Iranian affairs by U.S. administrations.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs considers as hypocritical statements of concern for the great Iranian nation, aimed at deceiving public opinion and covering up the numerous crimes committed against Iranians,” he said.
But the comments did not stop the US State Department from promoting images on social media platform X purporting to show protesters putting Trump stickers on roads or throwing away government-subsidized rice.
“When prices are set so high that neither consumers can afford to buy nor farmers can afford to sell, everyone loses,” the State Department said in a message. “It makes no difference if this rice is thrown away.”
Meanwhile, Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi remains imprisoned by authorities following her arrest in December.
“Since December 28, 2025, the Iranian people have taken to the streets, just as they did in 2009 and 2019,” said his son, Ali Rahmani.
“Each time, the same demands came up: the end of the Islamic Republic, the end of this patriarchal, dictatorial and religious regime, the end of the clerics, the end of the regime of the mullahs.”
