Thousands of Iranians protest in Tehran against Israel as Trump says US might join war in 2 weeks (Video)
Thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets of Tehran and other regions to protest against Israel amid the ongoing war.
Images on Iran’s state television showed protesters in Tehran holding up photographs of commanders killed since the start of the war.
“This is the Friday of the Iranian nation’s solidarity and resistance across the country,” the news anchor said.
“I will sacrifice my life for my leader,” read a protester’s banner, referring to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
According to state television, protests took place in other cities around the country, including in Tabriz in northwestern Iran and Shiraz in the south.
Similarly, protesters took to the streets in Lebanon and Iraq to denounce Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Iran.
In the Lebanese capital Beirut, hundreds of supporters of the pro-Iran Hezbollah movement poured into the city’s southern Dahieh suburb in a show of solidarity with Iran.
The protest began after the Muslim noon Friday prayers outside al-Qaeem Mosque in a Hezbollah stronghold where crowds chanted death to Israel, the United States and President Donald Trump.
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Demonstrators waved Iranian, Palestinian and Hezbollah flags, and voiced unwavering allegiance to Tehran.
“America is the great Satan,” shouted one protester, as loudspeakers played a recorded speech by the late Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September.
“No one can threaten the leaders of Iran,” he declared. As the rally unfolded, Israeli drones flew at low altitudes over Beirut and its southern suburbs.
In Iraq, tens of thousands of protesters rallied in various parts of the country, including the capital Baghdad, and protested against the Israeli attacks on neighbouring Iran, witnesses said.
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The demonstrations were in response to a call from Iraq’s influential Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Dozens of clerics led the protests that took place in several Iraqi areas, including the holy Shiite provinces of Karbala and Najaf, amid intense heat.
Some protesters chanted slogans against the Israeli strikes on Iran, and called on their government to block Israel from using Iraqi airspace to launch the strikes, witnesses said.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has set a two-week deadline to decide whether the US will join Israel’s war with Iran, allowing time to seek a negotiated end to the conflict, the White House said on Thursday.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt read out a message from Trump after what she called “a lot of speculation” about whether the United States would be “directly involved” in the conflict.
“Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks,” Trump said in the statement.
Trump has set two-week deadlines that subsequently shifted on a series of other tough topics in the past, including the Russia-Ukraine war — but Leavitt denied he was putting off a decision.
“If there’s a chance for diplomacy, the president’s always going to grab it, but he’s not afraid to use strength as well,” Leavitt said.
At the same time, Leavitt reinforced the sense of urgency, telling reporters that Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in the space of a “couple of weeks.”
“Iran has all that it needs to achieve a nuclear weapon. All they need is a decision from the supreme leader to do that, and it would take a couple of weeks to complete the production of that weapon,” she said.
Iran denies seeking a nuclear weapon, saying that its program is for peaceful purposes.
