Trump thanks Iran for canceling executions as senior cleric issues threats

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump took the unusual step on Friday of thanking the Iranian government for not following through on executions of what he said was meant to be hundreds of political prisoners.

“Iran canceled the hanging of over 800 people,” Trump told reporters while leaving the White House to spend the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. He added, “and I greatly respect the fact that they canceled.”

The Republican president also suggested on his social media site that more than 800 people had been set to be executed, but he said they now won’t be.

“Thank you!” he posted.

Those sentiments come after Trump spent days suggesting that the U.S. might strike Iran militarily if its government triggered mass killings during widespread protests that have swept that country.

The death toll from those protests continues to rise, activists say. Still, Trump seemed to hint that the prospects for U.S. military action were fading since Iran had held off on the executions.

The president’s rosy assessment did not match the more complicated situation on the ground in Iran but appeared to be Trump backing away from his early pronouncements that suggested a U.S. attack on that country might be imminent.

Trump had previously posted of Iran and the protesters there, “Help is on the way.” But asked if that was still the case on Friday, he replied: “Well, we’re going to see.”

Questioned about who convinced him to back down on seeming suggestions that he would strike Iran, Trump said, “Nobody convinced me. I convinced myself.”

“You had yesterday scheduled over 800 hangings. They didn’t hang anyone,” Trump said. “They canceled the hangings. That had a big impact.”

As Iran returned to uneasy calm, a senior hard-line cleric called Friday for the death penalty for detained demonstrators and directly threatened Trump — evidence of the rage gripping authorities in the Islamic Republic.

Harsh repression that has left several thousand people dead appears to have succeeded in stifling demonstrations that began Dec. 28 over Iran’s ailing economy and morphed into protests directly challenging the country’s theocracy.

There have been no signs of protests for days in Tehran, where shopping and street life have returned to outward normality, though a week-old internet blackout continued. Authorities have not reported any unrest elsewhere in the country.

The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency on Friday put the death toll, at 2,797. The number continues to rise.

Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi urged the U.S. to make good on its pledge to intervene, calling Trump “a man of his word.”

Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami’s sermon, carried by Iranian state radio, sparked chants from those gathered for prayers, including: “Armed hypocrites should be put to death!” Executions, as well as the killing of peaceful protesters, are two of the red lines laid down by Trump for possible military action against Iran.

Khatami, a member of Iran’s Assembly of Experts and Guardian Council long known for his hard-line views, described the protesters as the “butlers” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “Trump’s soldiers.” He insisted their plans “imagined disintegrating the country.”

“They should wait for hard revenge from the system,” Khatami said of Netanyahu and Trump. “Americans and Zionists should not expect peace.”

His fiery speech came as allies of Iran and the United States alike sought to defuse tensions. Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke Friday to both Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Israel’s Netanyahu, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.

Peskov said “the situation in the region is quite tense, and the president is continuing his efforts to help de-escalate it.”

Russia had previously kept largely quiet about the protests. Moscow has watched several key allies suffer blows as its resources and focus are consumed by its 4-year-old war against Ukraine, including the downfall of Syria’s former President Bashar Assad in 2024, last year’s U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, and the U.S. seizure of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro this month.

Days after Trump pledged “help is on its way” for the protesters, both the demonstrations and the prospect of imminent U.S. retaliation appeared to have receded. One diplomat told the Associated Press that top officials from Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar had raised concerns with Trump that a U.S. military intervention would shake the global economy and destabilize an already volatile region.

Yet the Trump administration has warned it will act if Iran executes detained protesters. Pahlavi, whose father was overthrown by Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, said he still believes the president’s promise of assistance.

“I believe the president is a man of his word,” Pahlavi told reporters in Washington. He added that ”regardless of whether action is taken or not, we as Iranians have no choice to carry on the fight.“

Despite support by diehard monarchists in the diaspora, Pahlavi has struggled to gain wider appeal within Iran. But that has not stopped him from presenting himself as the transitional leader of Iran if the regime were to fall.

Iran and the U.S. traded angry accusations Thursday at a session of the United Nations Security Council, with U.S. ambassador Mike Waltz saying that Trump “has made it clear that all options are on the table to stop the slaughter.”

Gholam Hossein Darzi, the deputy Iranian ambassador to the U.N., blasted the U.S. for what he said was American “direct involvement in steering unrest in Iran to violence.”

Khatami, the hard-line cleric, also provided the first overall statistics on damage from the protests, claiming 350 mosques, 126 prayer halls, and 20 other holy places had sustained damage. Another 80 homes of Friday prayer leaders — an important position within Iran’s theocracy — were also damaged, likely underlining the anger demonstrators felt toward symbols of the government.

He said 400 hospitals, 106 ambulance, 71 fire department vehicles, and another 50 emergency vehicles also sustained damage.

Even as protests appeared to have been smothered inside Iran, thousands of exiled Iranians and their supporters have taken to the streets in cities across Europe to shout out their rage at the government of the Islamic Republic.

Amid the continuing internet shutdown, some Iranians crossed borders to communicate with the outside world. At a border crossing in Turkey’s eastern province of Van, a trickle of Iranians crossing Friday said they were traveling to get around the communications blackout.

“I will go back to Iran after they open the internet,” said a traveler who gave only his first name, Mehdi, out of security concerns.

Also crossing the border were some Turkish citizens escaping the unrest in Iran.

Mehmet Önder, 47, was in Tehran for his textiles business when the protests erupted. He said laid low in his hotel until it was shut for security reasons, then stayed with one of his customers until he was able to return to Turkey.

Although he did not venture into the streets, Önder said he heard heavy gunfire.

“I understand guns, because I served in the military in the southeast of Turkey,” he said. “The guns they were firing were not simple weapons. They were machine guns.”

In a sign of the conflict’s potential to spill over borders, a Kurdish separatist group in Iraq said it has launched attacks on Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in recent days in retaliation for Tehran’s crackdown on protests.

A representative of the Kurdistan Freedom Party, or PAK, said its members have “played a role in the protests through both financial support and armed operations to defend protesters when needed.” The group said the attacks were launched by members of its military wing based inside Iran.

The death toll of at least 2,797, provided by the Human Rights Activists News Agency, exceeds that of any other round of protest or unrest in Iran in decades and recalls the chaos surrounding the 1979 revolution.

The agency has been accurate throughout years of demonstrations, relying on a network of activists inside Iran that confirms all reported fatalities. The AP has been unable to independently confirm the toll. Iran’s government has not provided casualty figures.