Iran remained largely offline as the nationwide internet blackout passed its 132nd hour, internet monitoring group NetBlocks said Wednesday.
“Metrics show Iran remains offline as the country wakes to another day of digital darkness,” NetBlocks said, adding that early reports indicate thousands of casualties and that the lack of connectivity is obscuring the true scale of the killings.
Fars news agency, which is affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, wrote that internet restrictions should continue as protests persist across the country.
It argued that maintaining limits on internet access is necessary, linking the blackout to what it described as security concerns during the unrest.

What is unfolding in Iran is a clash between a state that treats isolation and sacrifice as strategic virtues, and a society no longer willing to bear the economic and human cost of the Islamic Republic’s ideological and regional ambitions.
In recent weeks, millions have taken part in an unprecedented challenge to the Islamic Republic — and under a nationwide communications blackout, at least 12,000 people have been shot dead in what amounts to the largest mass killing of Iran’s contemporary history.
The collapse of the rial may have ignited the protests, but this wave of defiance runs far deeper than exchange-rate volatility. It reflects a society exhausted by decades of strategic deprivation.
The poverty pushing millions to the brink is not simply the result of policy error or mismanagement. It is the by-product of a conscious political choice: a calculated trade-off.
Tehran and its defenders routinely blame sanctions. Western analysts point to corruption or incompetence. Both explanations miss the governing logic at work.
What defines the Islamic Republic’s decision-making is not a lack of alternatives, but a rigid hierarchy of priorities: ideological integrity and regional reach consistently outrank broad-based prosperity.
In this calculus, economic crisis is not an unintended detour from the leadership’s path; it is the terrain on which that path has been chosen.
Fear of external influence and so-called “cultural invasion” reinforces this worldview. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has repeatedly framed material prosperity and deep integration with global markets as vulnerabilities that erode faith and weaken resistance.
His much-touted “Resistance Economy” is not designed to escape sanctions, but to endure them. It promises resilience, not growth; survival, not transformation.
That trade-off cascades through policy. The drive for agricultural self-sufficiency, promoted as revolutionary virtue, has drained aquifers and destabilized rural livelihoods, as water-intensive crops and inefficient irrigation exhaust already scarce groundwater.
Meanwhile, a maze of subsidies, multiple exchange rates, and import restrictions creates rents that enrich well-connected actors while suffocating independent enterprise. These distortions are tolerated—even sustained—because they preserve political control and reward loyalty over innovation.
Even when officials acknowledge the scale of failure, they remain bound by the same red lines that produced it.
The water crisis lays this contradiction bare. Faced with mounting shortages, authorities warn of “water bankruptcy” and champion desalination plants and transfer megaprojects as proof of resolve, while continuing to treat self-sufficiency in water-intensive crops as a strategic achievement rather than a structural mistake.
The result is improvisation without reform: capital flows to spectacular projects that buy time, while the incentives driving depletion and waste remain untouched.
In such a system, rising living standards are irrelevant. Economic pain does not trigger reform because reform risks undoing the political architecture that keeps the Islamic Republic intact.
On the streets today, that logic is meeting its reckoning. Protesters are not merely rejecting inflation or unemployment; they are rejecting the premise that their suffering serves a higher purpose.
In recent remarks, Khamenei praised young people who aspire to “meet their maker” and embrace sacrifice over material advancement. Yet the chants echoing across Iranian cities demand something else entirely: dignity over obedience, participation over submission, a future to build rather than one to forfeit.
Confronted with this unrest, the leadership retreats to its familiar narrative of foreign plots, dismissing protesters as agents of outside powers. That rhetoric cannot conceal the deeper confrontation underway: two visions of national purpose that cannot coexist within a single political order.
One demands a society willing to trade its welfare, opportunities, and youth for an ideological project. The other, facing bullets and batons, is signaling that this exchange—their lives for the regime’s vision—is no longer acceptable.
For a generation that refuses to be treated as collateral, the Islamic Republic and its leader have no answer.
Amir Avivi, chairman of the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF), said the Iranian government is facing imminent collapse, predicting major regional changes and suggesting a large-scale US-led military action could occur in the near future.
“Today I can say something we couldn’t have said a month ago: this regime is going down. There will be no Iranian regime, and this is going to change entirely, the future of Israel,” Avivi said in a news event with Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
“And indeed, I think that we’ll see in the very near future a massive American attack, with the help of Israel and with the demonstrators. I think this regime stands no chance, and they will fall,” he added.
Exiled Iranian prince Reza Pahlavi said on Tuesday the death toll from unrest in Iran has surged in recent days and called on the international community, including the United States, to provide meaningful support to protesters facing what he described as deadly force from authorities.
“The sad news is that we have had more casualties in the last two days — four times the number of people who were dead as a result of the 9/11 terrorist attack. What we get so far is at least, plus 12,000. It might be more, but that’s the minimum number we know have been killed,” Pahlavi told Fox News with Brett Baier.
“We are talking about using military weapons, AK-47s, armored trucks, to shoot to kill unarmed protesters. Their bodies are being picked up by bulldozers, he added.
Asked if he supports any military action, the prince said this is about saving lives and not aggressive interference.
“When civilians are being murdered and massacred in a war waged against them by their own government, some additional help is needed. I’m not talking about aggression — I’m talking about helping a nation liberate itself,” Pahlavi said.

Republican senators on Tuesday threw their weight behind a US attack against Iran, framing potential intervention as a path to regime change welcomed by protesters, as Democrats urged restraint and warned of backlash in interviews with Iran International.
“Help is on the way,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said. “Regime change is a result of the people not wanting to live in a country where a 16-year-old girl can be killed for not wearing the headscarf.”
“They don’t want to live a country governed by an Ayatollah who’s a religious fanatic,” he added. “I am following the people. They want a new life.”
Graham said the fall of the Islamic Republic would have major regional consequences.
“If this regime falls, it will be a godsend to America,” he said. “The largest state sponsor of terrorism will fall, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the good people of Iran will be in charge.”
Asked about timing, Graham said, “I’ll leave it up to the president, but if you saw his tweet today, I would say soon, because if we let it go much longer, people are going to doubt.”
Senator Markwayne Mullin also warned Tehran to take President Donald Trump’s threats seriously.
“The murderous regime and Iran needs to pay attention to what the president said,” Mullin told Iran International.
“The president made it very clear if you’re killing the innocent or simply protesting that he’ll come to the rescue and the president doesn’t bluff.”
“But it’s always on his timing when we’re ready to go,” Mullin added.
By contrast, Democratic senators urged restraint.
“My heart is broken for the people of Iran who are protesting, understandably, the economic failures and the repression of that regime,” Senator Richard Blumenthal said. “I think we should be very, very careful about any military operation there because it would backfire and actually bolster the regime.”
Senator Dick Durbin also cautioned against US intervention.
“I’m very concerned with the situation in Iran and statements made by President Trump about the demonstrators,” Durbin said. “I think we need to take care to make sure that we don’t overstep our boundaries.”
Referring to the Iraq war, he added: “When I was one of the 23 who voted against the invasion of Iraq, and I still think that that was the right vote, maybe one of the most important votes of my career.”
President Donald Trump joined a meeting on Iran on Tuesday evening after returning from Detroit, according to reporting from Axios journalist Barak Ravid.
"After he returned from Detroit earlier this evening, President Trump joined the Iran meeting that was chaired by Vice President Vance and attended by his top national security team. Trump was briefed on the situation in Iran, according to a source with knowledge of the matter," he posted on X.






