Iran has warned that it is ‘ready for war’ after US President Donald Trump threatened to ‘hit them at levels that they’ve never been hit before’ as anti-government protests enter a third week.

It comes as US-based Human Rights Activist News Agency (HRANA) said nearly 500 protesters and 48 security personnel in Iran had died amid the Islamic Republic’s bloody crackdown targeting demonstrators.

‘It’s like a warzone, the streets are full of blood,’ an Iranian told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme.

Speaking aboard Air Force One on Sunday night, Trump threatened to intervene, saying: ‘The military is looking at it, and we’re looking at some very strong options.’

Asked about Iran’s threats of retaliation, he said: ‘If they do that, we will hit them at levels that they’ve never been hit before.’

Iran’s Foreign Minister Araqchi hit back at the comments, saying: ‘We are ready for war but also for dialogue.’

He added that the US president’s warning against Tehran of action should ⁠protests turn bloody motivated ‘terrorists’ to ⁠target demonstrators and security forces in order to ‍invite ⁠foreign intervention.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to use lethal force against the Iranian government for its violent efforts to suppress protestors, saying Iran ‘is in big trouble’ on Friday.

‘I’ve made the statement very strongly that if they start killing people like they have in the past, we will get involved,’ he told reporters.

Tehran’s attorney general, Mohammad Movahedi Azad, hit back at the threat, warning on Saturday that anyone taking part in protests will be considered an ‘enemy of God,’ a death-penalty charge.

Rhetoric only escalated when Mohammad Baagher Qalibaf, the hard-liner speaker of the Parliament of Iran, said Israel and ‘all American military centres, bases and ships in the region will be our legitimate targets’ in the event of an attack on Tehran.

Iranian protestors take to the streets in Pounak Square, in the capital Tehran, despite a government crackdown that has left nearly 500 protesters and 48 security personnel dead

Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One that the US military was looking at ‘some very strong options’

Iranians gather while blocking a street during a protest in Tehran, Iran on January 9, 2026

‘Things here are very, very bad. A lot of our friends have been killed,’ the anonymous Iranian woman told the BBC.

‘They’re taking away bodies in trucks, everyone is frightened tonight. They’re carrying out a massacre here – it’s officially a massacre.’

Almost 200 body bags have been seen in footage from a morgue near the Iranian capital as protests continue.

Another 10,600 people have been detained over the fortnight of unrest, HRANA said.

The Iranian government has imposed an internet shutdown since Thursday.

The protests mark the largest in Iran since a nationwide uprising in 2022, sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman who was detained by morality police for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly.

Trump said on Sunday that he would speak to tech billionaire Elon Musk, owner of company SpaceX which operates Starlink, about resuming internet access in Iran.

‘He’s very good at that kind of thing, he’s got a very good company,’ the US president said.

Speaking to foreign diplomats in Tehran, Foreign Minister Araghchi claimed ‘the situation has come under total control’ after violence spiked over the weekend.

The Qatar-funded Al Jazeera satellite news network, which has been allowed to work despite the internet being cut off in the country, carried his remarks.

On Sunday, Trump said Iran had proposed negotiations after his threat to strike the Islamic Republic over its bloody crackdown targeting demonstrators.

The US president and his national security team have been weighing a range of potential responses against Iran including cyber-attacks and direct strikes by the US or Israel, according to two people familiar with internal White House discussions who were not authorised to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

He said his administration was in talks to set up a meeting with Tehran, but cautioned he may have to act first as reports of the death toll in Iran mount and the government continues to arrest protesters.

‘I think they’re tired of being beat up by the United States,’ Trump said. ‘Iran wants to negotiate.

‘The meeting is being set up, but we may have to act because of what’s happening before the meeting. But a meeting is being set up. Iran called, they want to negotiate.’

Flames rise from burning debris in the middle of a street in Gorgan on January 10, 2026, as protesters set fire to makeshift barricades near a religious centre during ongoing anti-regime demonstrations

Images appeared to show a huge fire ripping through a government building in Karaj, near Tehran on January 9, 2026

A police station is set on fire during the protests on January 10, 2026

There was no immediate acknowledgement from Iran of the offering for a meeting.

The massive ongoing US military deployment to the Caribbean is a factor that the Pentagon and Trump’s national security planners must consider.

With the internet down in Iran and phone lines cut off, gauging the demonstrations from abroad has grown more difficult while Iran’s government has not offered overall casualty figures.

Those abroad fear the information blackout is emboldening hard-liners within Iran’s security services to launch a bloody crackdown.

Protesters flooded the streets in the country’s capital and its second-largest city on Saturday night into Sunday morning.

Online videos purported to show more demonstrations Sunday night into Monday, with a Tehran official acknowledging them in state media.

The threat to strike the US military and Israel came during a parliamentary speech by Qalibaf, the speaker of the body who has run for the presidency in the past.

He directly threatened Israel, calling it ‘the occupied territory’.

‘We do not consider ourselves limited to reacting after the action and will act based on any objective signs of a threat,’ he added.

Politicians rushed the dais in parliament, shouting: ‘Death to America!’

It remains unclear how serious Iran is about launching a strike, particularly after its air defences were destroyed during the 12-day war in June with Israel.

Any decision to go to war would rest with Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Last night, he issued a direct threat to Trump on X, saying the US president would be ‘overthrown’.

‘That father figure who sits there with arrogance and pride, passing judgment on the entire world, he too should know that usually the tyrants and oppressors of the world, such as Pharaoh and Nimrod and Reza Khan and Mohammad Reza and the likes of them, when they were at the peak of their pride, were overthrown,’ he wrote in Persian.

‘Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before,’ Trump wrote on social media on Saturday. ‘The USA stands ready to help!!!’

Police try to stop protesters climbing the outside wall toward the Iranian Embassy in London on January 11, 2026

An anti-Iranian regime protester with her face painted in the colours of the Iranian flag takes part in a demonstration outside the Iranian Consulate, in Istanbul, on January 11, 2026

A protester throws an object toward the Iranian Embassy as they clash with police in London this evening as anti-government demonstrations intensified

The US military has said in the Mideast it is ‘postured with forces that span the full range of combat capability to defend our forces, our partners and allies and US interests’.

Iran targeted US forces at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in June, while the US Navy’s Mideast-based 5th Fleet is stationed in the island kingdom of Bahrain.

Israel, meanwhile, is ‘watching closely’ the situation between the US and Iran, said an Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to not being authorised to speak to journalists.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio overnight on topics including Iran, the official added.

‘The people of Israel, the entire world, are in awe of the tremendous heroism of the citizens of Iran,’ said Netanyahu, a longtime Iran hawk.

At the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV mentioned Iran as a place ‘where ongoing tensions continue to claim many lives’, adding that: ‘I hope and pray that dialogue and peace may be patiently nurtured in pursuit of the common good of the whole of society.’

While the demonstrations began in late December in response to a currency crisis, they have since spread and grown in scale as Iranians demand wholescale changes to Tehran’s authoritarian leadership.

Khamenei said on Friday that the government would ‘not back down’ in the face of the large-scale unrest.

Protestors burn images of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a rally held in Solidarity with Iran’s uprising, organized by The National Council of Resistance of Iran, on Whitehall in central London on January 11, 2026

Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s deposed shah and a figure of Iran’s opposition in exile, said he was in favour of the US intervening to support of the mass protest movement against Khamenei’s theocratic rule.

‘They know that you’re not going to throw them under the bus, as has happened before. This is why they are empowered – by the hope that you have their back,’ he said in an interview on the Fox News programme ‘Sunday Morning Futures’, addressing Trump directly.

‘We need to cut the snake’s head off for good so it can no longer be a threat to Iranian interests, to American interests, to regional interests. And the only solution is to make sure this regime goes down for good and the Iranian people can liberate themselves,’ he said.

Born in Tehran in 1960 and once the country’s crown prince, Pahlavi, 65, has lived in exile since the 1979 revolution.

It was that revolution that ousted his father, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and brought in the rule of the Islamic Republic.

Asked whether he wanted the American military to ‘take out Khamenei,’ he said: ‘The people of Iran have responded and reacted positively to a promise of intervention.’