Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday said “several thousand people” died in this month’s anti-government demonstrations, his first acknowledgment of the deadly scale of the unrest.
Some of those were killed “brutally and inhumanely,” Khamenei said without offering detail in a public meeting broadcast on state TV.
He accused the US and Israel of aiding the killings and said the Islamic republic has evidence to support the claim.
Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader / West Asia News Agency via REUTERS
Iran does not intend to push the country toward war, but would not allow domestic or international criminals to go unpunished, Khamenei said.
He said US President Donald Trump was culpable for “deaths, damage and accusations he has inflicted on the Iranian people,” and that Washington’s broader policy goal was to place Iran under military, political and economic domination.
The toll suggested by Khamenei was in line with estimates from human rights groups and others that about 3,500 people had perished. The groups estimate that more than 22,000 people have been detained.
Trump told Politico that Iran needs new leadership, and said Khamenei is guilty of “the complete destruction of the country and the use of violence at levels never seen before.”
The protests have taken place during a record-long Internet blackout for Iran’s population of about 92 million people.
Earlier, local media reported that Internet connectivity had been partially restored, even as most residents appeared to remain largely cut off from the outside world.
Iran’s government shut down Internet and mobile phone services on Jan. 8 to quell rising unrest sparked by a currency crisis late last month.
“Internet access has now been restored for some subscribers,” the semiofficial Mehr news agency said, without specifying which restrictions had been lifted or whether users had regained access to international platforms and services.
The semiofficial Fars news agency also reported that mobile text messages had been reactivated after being blocked earlier.
The Internet traffic monitoring group NetBlocks said there had been a “very slight rise” in connectivity on Saturday, adding that overall access remained at about 2 percent of normal levels, with “no indication of a significant return.”
Users in Iran appeared largely offline as of early Saturday afternoon, with few signs of activity evident on platforms such as Telegram, Instagram and X — services they previously accessed via virtual private networks.
Near-total communications blackouts have become a familiar tool for Iranian authorities during critical situations, from this month’s nationwide protests to the June conflict with Israel. That has cut off much of the population from the global Internet and diverted users onto a government-controlled domestic network that operates independently of the wider web.
Earlier on Saturday, Fars cited authorities, who were not identified, as saying that Internet and other communications services were being gradually restored, but that some restrictions would remain in place “as long as security conditions require.”
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