Putin, Iran’s Pezeshkian hold phone call, Kremlin says

Award-winning Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi said Iran’s leaders would not be able to maintain control after the violent suppression of recent protests, predicting the system would eventually collapse.

“It is impossible for this government to sustain itself in this situation,” Panahi told the Guardian.

He said the recent internet blackout signaled that authorities were preparing for large-scale violence.

“They knew it would be a massacre,” he said. “But we never predicted it would reach these dimensions.”

Panahi said the timing of any collapse was impossible to predict but added: “The regime will collapse, 100%.”

Iran’stop Sunni cleric, Molavi Abdolhamid, said on Friday he was saddened by the killing of many citizens during the recent unrest and warned against the continued use of violence.

“Iran’s people are all citizens of one country, and protest is a natural right of the people,” Abdolhamid, the Sunni prayer leader of the southeastern city of Zahedan, said in remarks shared online.

He said Iranians had voted for the Islamic Republic with hopes of ending discrimination and achieving gender equality, equal rights for ethnic and religious groups, and social justice, but said those demands had not been met.

“The current situation is the result of a process that has taken shape over many years,” he said.

The head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, David Barnea, arrived in the United States on Friday for consultations on the situation in Iran, Axios reported citing an Israeli source and another person familiar with the matter.

The visit comes amid discussions between Washington and Israel over the protests in Iran and the possibility of US military action in response to Tehran’s crackdown, according to Axios.

Barnea is expected to meet US officials, including White House envoy Steve Witkoff, who has been handling a direct channel of communication with Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, the report said.

It was not immediately clear whether Barnea would meet President Donald Trump during his visit.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said on Friday he had spoken with the European Union’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas and the foreign minister of Cyprus, which currently holds the EU presidency, about the deadly crackdown on protesters in Iran.

“The main focus of the conversation was the murderous repression of Iranian citizens’ protests and their struggle for freedom by the Iranian regime,” Sa’ar wrote on X.

He said he had called on the European Union to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization.

“The Revolutionary Guards are today leading the repression and the slaughter of Iranian citizens,” Sa’ar said, adding that the group had for decades promoted terrorism and instability in the Middle East and beyond.

Sa’ar said such a move would be a practical step and would also send what he called a message of hope to Iranians.

US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff said on Thursday he hoped tensions with Iran could be resolved through diplomacy, while warning that the alternative would be worse.

“I hope there’s a diplomatic resolution. I really do,” Witkoff said at a conference organized by the Israel-America Council in Florida.

He said Washington’s concerns centered on what he described as four main issues: nuclear enrichment, missile capabilities, stockpiles of enriched material and Iran’s regional proxies.

“There are four issues: nuclear enrichment, missiles – they have to cut back on their inventory – the actual material that they have, which is roughly 2,000 kilograms, which is enriched anywhere between 3.67% and 60, and the proxies, of course,” he said.

“If they want to come back to the League of Nations, we can solve those four problems diplomatically, and then that would be a great resolution,” he added. “And I think the alternative is a bad one.”

Witkoff also said the Trump administration had opened direct communications with Iranian officials amid concerns about possible mass executions.

“At his direction, we communicated with the Iranians yesterday,” he said. “One of the things we were concerned about were the killings that were rumored to be on the way – hangings, mass hangings – and that’s been shut down.”

He said Iran’s internal pressures could shape its next steps, citing what he described as power shortages, water scarcity and high inflation.