Protests in Iran last another night and deaths rise as Trump renews his warning of possible US intervention.

protests in Iran It erupted on Friday night in the Islamic Republic, online videos purported to show, despite threats from the country’s theocracy to crack down on protesters after shutting down the Internet and cutting phone lines to the world. He protesters He appeared to be encouraged by repeated statements of support from the Trump administration and the country’s exiled crown prince, who called on them Saturday to try to overwhelm security forces and take over towns and cities.

An outside human rights group relying on information from contacts inside Iran says at least 65 people have died in the protests, which started in Tehran at the end of December as anger over Iran’s weakened economy, but it quickly spread and became the most significant challenge to the government in years.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei accused President Trump of having his hands “stained with the blood of Iranians” in remarks broadcast on Iranian state television on Friday, as his supporters gathered before him chanted “Death to America!”

Protesters are “ruining their own streets… to please the president of the United States,” Khamenei, 86, told the crowd at his compound in Tehran. “Because he said he would come to your aid. Instead, you should pay attention to the state of your own country.”

State media subsequently called protesters “terrorists,” setting the stage for a possible violent crackdown: how Iran has responded to other major protests in recent years, despite Trump’s promise to back peaceful protesters, with force if necessary.

Trump issues new warnings to Iran’s leaders

Trump has repeatedly vowed to attack Iran if protesters are killed, a threat that has taken on added significance after the U.S. military raid that detained former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The president suggested Friday that any potential U.S. attack wouldn’t “mean troops on the ground, but that means hitting them very, very hard where it hurts the most.”

“Iran is in big trouble,” Trump said. “It seems to me that people are taking over certain cities that no one thought were really possible just a few weeks ago.”

He added: “I tell the Iranian leaders that they better not start shooting because we will start shooting too.”

In a brief social media post published early Saturday morning in Washington, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that “the United States stands with the brave people of Iran.”

The Iranian regime warns that protesters will be punished “without any legal leniency”

The head of Iran’s judiciary, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, separately promised that the punishment of protesters “will be decisive, maximum and without any legal leniency.”

According to the Washington DC-based Human Rights Activist News Agency, founded by anti-regime activists, as of Friday, the 13th day of unrest in Iran, at least 65 people had died, including at least 14 members of the security forces. More than 2,300 people were arrested and protests were reported in at least 180 cities.

Iranian authorities shut down the internet on Thursday night as protests sharply escalated, apparently as people heeded a call from the exiled crown prince, an outspoken opposition figure, for Iranians to raise their voices against the regime.

According to an update posted online Saturday morning by monitoring organization NetBlocks, “metrics show the countrywide internet blackout remains in place for 36 hours, severely limiting Iranians’ ability to check on the safety of friends and loved ones.”

That communications blackout has made it incredibly difficult to get a clear picture of the scale of the protests overall and the response from Iranian authorities. Some other reports put the death toll from the riots much higher, and TIME quoted a doctor in Tehran as saying that at least 217 people had died, for example.

Iranian authorities have acknowledged some deaths, but usually only those of security forces.

A doctor and a doctor at two hospitals in Iran told News themezone partner BBC News that their facilities were overwhelmed with the injured. The doctor said an eye hospital in Tehran had gone into crisis mode, while the BBC also obtained a message from a doctor at another hospital saying the center did not have enough surgeons to handle the influx of patients. The doctor stated that many of the injured had gunshot wounds to the head and eyes.

When asked by News themezone how seriously he thinks Iran’s autocratic rulers are taking Trump’s warnings not to kill protesters, Maziar Bahari, editor of the IranWire news website, said he was sure it had “really scared a lot of Iranian officials and might have affected their actions in terms of how they confront the protesters.”

“But at the same time… it has inspired many protesters to come out, because they know that the leader of the world’s leading superpower is supporting their cause,” said Bahari, who spent months in Iranian prisons after being arrested during a previous round of mass unrest in 2009.

“A lot of people have called what’s happening in Iran a revolution,” Bahari told News themezone’ Haley Ott. “And we can see different signs of revolution in Iran in the movement. But a revolution usually needs a leader for the revolution. But we don’t have that leader.”

But while decades of draconian control over the media and the deliberate marginalization of dissenting voices in the country have deprived Iran of a clear opposition figure within the country’s borders, many in the vast Iranian diaspora hope that the nation’s ousted royal family can return.

Online videos contradict state media

Saturday marks the start of the work week in Iran, but many schools and universities reportedly held classes online, Iranian state television reported. Internal Iranian government websites are believed to be operating.

State television repeatedly played a martial orchestral arrangement of Iranian composer Majid Entezami’s “Epic of Khorramshahr” while showing pro-government demonstrations. The song, broadcast repeatedly during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran last year, pays tribute to Iran’s liberation of the city of Khorramshahr in 1982 during the Iran-Iraq war. It has also been used in videos of protesting women cutting their hair to protest the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022.

Meanwhile, state television reported that “peace prevailed in most of the country’s cities” overnight, with “no news of any gatherings or chaos in Tehran and most provinces.” This was directly contradicted by an online video verified by the News showing demonstrations in the Saadat Abad area of ​​Tehran. Thousands of people gathered in the street and one man could be heard shouting “Death to Khamenei!”

The semi-official Fars news agency, believed to be close to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard and one of the few media outlets able to publish to the outside world, published surveillance camera footage of what it said came from demonstrations in Isfahan. In it, one protester appeared to fire a long gun, while others set fires and threw gasoline bombs at what appeared to be a government complex.

The Young Journalists Club, associated with state television, reported that protesters killed three members of the Guard’s all-volunteer Basij force in the city of Gachsaran. It also reported that a security official was stabbed to death in Hamadan province, a police officer was killed in the port city of Bandar Abbas and another in Gilan, as well as one person was killed in Mashhad.

State television also broadcast images of a funeral attended by hundreds of people in Qom, a Shiite seminary city south of Tehran.

Iran’s theocracy cut the nation off from the Internet and international phone calls on Thursday, although it allowed some state and semi-official media to publish. Qatar’s state-funded Al Jazeera news network reported live from Iran, but appeared to be the only major foreign outlet able to work.

Head of Iran’s exiled royal family predicts his return is ‘very close’

Many analysts have seen Iran’s exiled crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, as a galvanizing force behind the push for this round of protests. On Saturday, he called on Iranians not only to continue taking to the streets, but to try to wrest control of towns and cities from the authorities by overwhelming them..

“Our goal is no longer just to take to the streets. The goal is to prepare to take over and control the city centers,” Pahlavi said in his latest video message posted on social media, calling for more demonstrations on Saturday and Sunday.

In an optimistic tone, Pahlavi declared that he was “preparing to return to my homeland,” suggesting that the day he could do so was “very close.”

But Pahlavi has lived in exile for almost 50 years, and while he has long sought to position himself as a budding leader, it is far from clear how much real support he has within the country.

His father, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, was widely despised within Iran when he himself fled into exile amid street protests in 1979, as the Islamic Revolution that brought the current regime to power took hold. Protesters have shouted in support of the shah at some protests, but it is unclear whether that is support for Pahlavi himself or a desire to return to a time before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.