People rallied in the streets of Tehran on Thursday night, witnesses said, marking a new escalation of ongoing protests in Iran after a call by exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi for a mass demonstration. Internet access and telephone lines in Iran cut out immediately after the protests began.
The protests represented the first test of whether the Iranian public could be swayed by Pahlavi, whose fatally ill father, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, fled the country just before the the 1979 Islamic Revolution and died in exile in 1980.
Demonstrations have included chants in support of the shah, something that would have brought a death sentence in the past, but now underlines the anger fuelling protests that began over Iran’s ailing economy.
Thursday saw a continuation of the demonstrations that popped up in cities and rural towns across Iran on Wednesday. More markets and bazaars shut down in support of the protests.
So far, 41 people have been killed in the violence around the demonstrations, while more than 2,270 others have been detained, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.
The growth of the protests increases the pressure on Iran’s civilian government and its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
CloudFlare, an internet firm, and the advocacy group NetBlocks reported the internet outage, both attributing it to Iranian government interference. Attempts to dial landlines and mobile phones from Dubai to Iran could not be connected.
Such outages have in the past been followed by intense government crackdowns.
Meanwhile, the protests themselves have remained broadly leaderless. It remains unclear how Pahlavi’s call will affect the demonstrations moving forward.
“The lack of a viable alternative has undermined past protests in Iran,” wrote Nate Swanson of the Washington-based Atlantic Council, who studies Iran.
“There may be a thousand Iranian dissident activists who, given a chance, could emerge as respected statesmen, as Labor Leader Lech Wałęsa did in Poland at the end of the Cold War. But so far, the Iranian security apparatus has arrested, persecuted and exiled all of the country’s potential transformational leaders.”
Thursday’s demonstration rallies at home and in street
“Great nation of Iran, the eyes of the world are upon you. Take to the streets and, as a united front, shout 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 closely watching you. Suppression of the people will not go unanswered.”
Pahlavi had called for demonstrations at 8 p.m. local time on Thursday and Friday. When the clock struck, neighbourhoods across Tehran erupted in chanting, witnesses said.
The 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 could be seen on the streets.
Pahlavi had said he would offer further plans depending on the response to his call. His support of and from Israel has drawn criticism in the past — particularly after the 12-day war Israel waged on Iran in June.
Demonstrators have shouted in support of the shah in some protests, but it isn’t clear whether that’s support for Pahlavi himself or a desire to return to a time before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Iranian officials appeared to be taking the planned demonstrations seriously. The hard-line Kayhan newspaper published a video online claiming security forces would use drones to identify those taking part.
Iranian officials have offered no acknowledgment of the scale of the overall protests, which raged across many locations Thursday even before the 8 p.m. demonstration. However, there has been reporting regarding security officials being hurt or killed.
The judiciary’s Mizan news agency report a police colonel suffered fatal stab wounds in a town outside of Tehran, while the semi-official Fars news agency said gunmen killed two security force members and wounded 30 others in a shooting in the city of Lordegan in Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province.
A deputy governor in Iran’s Khorasan Razavi province told Iranian state television that an attack at a police station killed five people Wednesday night in Chenaran, some 700 kilometres northeast of Tehran.
Late Thursday, the Revolutionary Guard said two members of its forces were killed in Kermanshah.
Iran weighs Trump threat
Iran has faced rounds of nationwide protests in recent years. As sanctions tightened and Iran struggled following the 12-day war, its rial currency collapsed in December, with $1 US now costing some 1.4 million rials. Protests began soon after, with demonstrators chanting against Iran’s theocracy.
It remains unclear why Iranian officials have yet to crack down hard on the demonstrators. Trump warned last week that if Tehran “violently kills peaceful protesters,” America “will come to their rescue.”
U.S. 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 then accused the U.S. of stoking the demonstrations, which have been driven in part by the collapse of Iran’s currency.
Trump’s comments drew a new rebuke from Iran’s Foreign Ministry, which noted the “long history of criminal interventions” in Iranian affairs by U.S. administrations
“The Foreign Ministry considers claims of concern for the great Iranian nation to be hypocritical, aimed at deceiving public opinion and covering up the numerous crimes committed against Iranians,” it said.
But those comments haven’t stopped the U.S. State Department on the social media platform X from highlighting footage purporting to show demonstrators putting up stickers naming roads after Trump 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 one message. “It makes no difference if this rice is thrown away.”
Meanwhile, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi remains imprisoned by authorities after her arrest in December.
“Since Dec. 28, 2025, the people of Iran have taken to the streets, just as they did in 2009, 2019,” said her son, Ali Rahmani.
“Each time, the same demands came up: an end to the Islamic Republic, an end to this patriarchal, dictatorial and religious regime, the end of the clerics, the end of the mullahs’ regime.”
