Category World News

Protests are nothing new in Iran. Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, the sanctions-hit country has been rocked by repeated waves of demonstrations.

However, experts say the current deadly upheaval is unprecedented, due to a potent mix of rising domestic pressures and aggressive threats from the United States – leaving Iran’s leaders with fewer options on what to do next.

What started on December 28 with shopkeepers protesting at Tehran’s Grand Bazaar over the Iranian currency’s loss of value quickly morphed into nationwide demonstrations that attracted an unusually broad social coalition.

The record slump in value of the Iranian rial was just the latest in a long line of crises – from water shortages and electricity outages to rising unemployment and rampant inflation that has long swallowed families’ income.

The reimposition of punishing US sanctions in 2018 made daily life harder for millions of Iranians, with many losing confidence in the authorities’ capacity to improve the economy and crack down on mismanagement and corruption.

The situation has been compounded by US President Donald Trump, who, in June, ordered air attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and is now loudly threatening to attack Iran again, claiming his aim is to “help” protesters.

“This is a much weaker economic situation, a much worse geopolitical circumstance for Iran, and dissent within the system itself is clearly at a different level,” said Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute.

Government stuck

Initially, the government attempted to address the grievances by rolling out a series of economic reforms. The changes included replacing the central bank governor and scrapping a preferential exchange rate for imports of certain basic goods, making a $7 monthly cash transfer instead.

But the moves felt flat. And as the protests widened, the security forces’ response entered a new, more violent phase.

Since January 8, authorities have imposed a near-total communication blackout, while thousands of people have been arrested.

Iran has released no official toll, but authorities say more than 100 security forces have been killed. Opposition activists say the death toll is much higher and it includes hundreds of protesters.

This is not the first time the government has resorted to harsh tactics. The difference, experts say, is that it seems unable to find a path forward, even if it succeeds in quelling the current round of dissent.

“I can’t do anything,” President Masoud Pezeskhian admitted on the eve of the protests, in reference to the country’s economic difficulties.

Past major upheavals have resulted in the government providing some benefits to the Iranians.

After mass protests in 2009, Iran showed flexibility by negotiating a nuclear deal with the West. Following protests driven by the state of the economy in 2019, authorities used the state’s coffers to continue handing out subsidies. And after the women-led mass protests in 2022, authorities loosened some social restrictions.

But today’s options are limited, said Roxana Farmanfarmaian, a professor of modern Middle East politics at the University of Cambridge. “We see that the regime is very isolated and without many options to solve the economic problems, and that translates into a sense that it’s at a dead end,” she said.

Iran is not only facing pressure from within. Its system of allies has been greatly weakened since Israel’s multi-front regional wars starting in 2023, while a 12-day conflict with Israel left the country’s defence capabilities in a diminished state.

With the shadow of a potential US military intervention looming large, Iranian authorities see the protests as more than just an internal matter.

“There is a widespread view within the system that this is being completely coordinated by the US and Israel, that this is the beginning of the next phase of the 12-day war,” said Parsi.

In June, tensions between Iran and Israel erupted into an all-out war, which ended with the US striking key nuclear sites in Iran. Since then, Israel has also made no secret of wanting another round of strikes against Tehran to finally see regime change there.

Venezuela option

The sense of a looming external threat is such that the army – which rarely gets involved in domestic matters, as opposed to the more ideological Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – has issued a statement declaring its support for the government, adding that it will protect the country’s strategic infrastructure.

“The perception from Tehran is that they [Israeli authorities] are [attempting] to soften the ground for another war. That’s why the military is taking a position, because they see it as an existential threat,” Parsi said.

The US has made clear that strikes against Iran are an option. In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera, Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi warned the US that his country is ready for war if Washington wants to “test” it.

It is not clear how and if Trump will attack, but his abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on January 3 shows he is increasingly willing to attack foreign countries and remove leaders, while leaving regimes largely intact.

“Iran may think that the US may hope that a targeted strike would eliminate the supreme leader or a number of key leaders, and then the US would try to force what is left of the Islamic Republic to do what the leader refuses to do on nuclear or missile issues,” said Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University.

“Their reading of Venezuela is that the US… wants to change the game in Iran, but that the US is not about to invade Iran with troops, and the US is not necessarily looking for regime change and nation-building of the kind we saw in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

So far, Iran’s political leadership has remained unified, with no confirmed defections within the armed forces. But squeezed between a structural economic crisis and the threat of external intervention, it seems to have fewer strategic options, said Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute.

Jabalia, Gaza – Omar Halawa got up from his chair, like any 13-year-old child would. But he had forgotten a devastating detail about himself: he only had one leg.

“He fell off the chair,” his mother Yasmin Halawa told Al Jazeera. “It is very sad for us all, seeing him like that.”

Omar lost his right leg three months ago. On October 1, 2025, as Israel intensified its ground invasion of Gaza amid ceasefire talks with Hamas, Omar was on the street with his 11-year-old sister Layan, cousin Moath Halawa, 13, and friend Mohammed Al Siksik, also 13, to get water from a tanker that had come near their camp in north Gaza’s Jabalia area.

“It was impossible to pay 6000 shekels for a vehicle to get us to the south, so we had decided to stay in the north,” recalled Yasmin, adding that the family had been displaced more than 15 times during the Israeli genocidal war that began in October 2023.

“The drinking water supply became very rare in the area, so the children of the camp decided to get up just after dawn to be able to get in line for a gallon of water. Moments later, the shelling started and we felt afraid for our children, Layan and Omar,” she said.

As she reeled from doubts over sending the children to get water, they heard someone shouting that Omar had been hit by the shelling.

“The first thing he asked when he woke up after surgery was about his friend and cousin who were in line with him for water,” said Yasmin. “They were both killed.”

The family buried Omar’s amputated leg near their tent. He visits the grave every day. “My leg went to heaven before me,” he says.

‘Worst place in the world for children’

Omar had been grappling with deaths and destructions as soon as the war started. In November 2023, as Israel bombed northern Gaza, Layan was injured by shattered glass of the windows all around their house.

“After a horrific night, we left the house raising a white piece of cloth so that the Israeli soldiers don’t shoot at us, holding Hatem between my arms and walking with Omar and Layan by my side. On the way out, they saw the beheaded body of their eight-year-old cousin along with other martyrs. They froze in horror and started screaming and crying,” said Yasmin. Hatem is four.

“My children have been emotionally disturbed after that experience. Layan struggled with bedwetting and Omar is afraid all the time, even from the sound of a chair hitting the floor.”

Omar and Layal are among tens of thousands of children in Gaza bearing the scars of a brutal genocide that has killed more than 71,000 Palestinians, 20,000 of them children. Nearly 42,000 other children have been injured, half of them sustaining life-altering injuries, as the Israeli attacks continue in violation of a United States-brokered ceasefire.

At least 39,000 children in Gaza are now left without one or both parents – the largest orphan crisis in modern history.

“Instead of enjoying their childhood, Palestinian children are living in the worst place in the world for children. Even after the agreed ceasefire, more than 95 children have been killed,” UNICEF spokesperson Kazem Abu Khalaf told Al Jazeera, adding that more than 4,000 children in Gaza need immediate medical evacuation.

Two years of severe Israeli blockade on food and essential aid has made the humanitarian crisis even worse. “Almost 165 children have died due to malnutrition and hunger in Gaza since October 2023,” Khalaf said.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) says 1.6 million Palestinians in Gaza, or 77 percent of its population, including about 800,000 children, will continue to face acute food insecurity in 2026.

‘On cold days, it hurts even more’

Among the children in desperate need of nutrition is Rahaf Al Najjar, who is also 13 like Omar.

Rahaf was fetching food for her five siblings in northwest Gaza’s Sudaniya area in September last year when fire from an Israeli quadcopter pierced both her legs.

“She is healing slowly. I am only able to provide her four eggs a week. She still has inflammation in both her legs and needs more nutritious food to heal faster. I can’t bring meat or chicken for her, I don’t have enough money for that. Sometimes, I bring her a fruit to eat without letting her siblings know about it,” Rahaf’s 35-year-old mother Buthayna Al Najjar told Al Jazeera at their tent in Jabalia.

Rahaf says the ongoing harsh winter has made her injury worse. “On cold days, it hurts even more. I feel electric‑like jolts in my leg. I need to take a medicine to feel better and be able to sleep,” she told Al Jazeera.

Rahaf witnessed the killing of her father Ghassan Al Najjar, who, she says, “used to pamper her more than her other siblings”.

Ghassan died in an Israeli drone strike on November 5, 2024 while he was pulling the body of his cousin at Jabalia camp. Buthayna says Rahaf was able to crawl to her wounded father and dragged his body inside a tent.

“Her father was still alive. He told her: ‘Be strong, my daughter, and say salam to your mom’. Then he took his last breath while she was still holding him, screaming and crying,” the mother recalled.

Rahaf says she misses her father most when she is hungry or in pain. She also misses school. “I wish I could get back to school. I miss drawing and PE classes,” she told Al Jazeera.

Buthayna says she has no money left for her children’s education. “I sold my mobile after losing my husband, so I could get my kids some food,” she said.

Fears of losing ‘a whole generation’

Interrupted education and a loss of familiar routines has worsened feelings of uncertainty and helplessness among Gaza’s children, who have lost two years of schooling due to the bombing and displacement, and are forced to live in tents and help in fetching food and water for their displaced families.

“We have lost more than 20,000 students in the Israeli war during two years of aggression,” Jawad Shiekh-Khalil, director of education in western Gaza, told Al Jazeera. “Ninety percent of the Ministry of Education’s buildings have been completely or partially destroyed in the Israeli bombardment, and the remaining ones have turned into shelters for the displaced families.”

He said they have implemented a new strategy, called an ‘Emergency Plan’, to make up for the education they have misses for two years.

“Since the ceasefire, Israel has restricted entry of school supplies or stationery. Students can’t find paper, pencils, notebooks, or even chalk. We have almost 400 registered educational points – most of them are tents spread across the Strip, for about 150,000 students,” Shiekh-Khalil said.

UNICEF’s Khalaf also said they are launching a back-to-learning programme to get Gaza’s children resume their education and “make sure they don’t forget what they have learned before”.

“We can’t wait to lose a whole generation,” he said.

‘Traumatised children’

Bahzad Al Akhras, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Gaza, told Al Jazeera that losing academic education for two years affects children’s cognitive, emotional, and social developments.

“Being away from school and having schools as shelters affects how children perceive the school as related to crowdedness and harsh living conditions,” he said. “A student will not be able to develop cognitive functions adequately when away from academic environment and the peer support.”

Al Akhras said the genocidal war has impacted the children of Gaza in several ways.

“The direct impact is seen in children who were trapped under the rubble, children who sustained severe injuries, orphaned children, and those who had experiences with the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints. The indirect impact is seen in the collapse of the education system as well as the ongoing starvation,” he said.

The psychiatrist said children, unlike adults, are unable to express themselves verbally, often displaying behavioral manifestations of trauma.

“Traumatised children show symptoms of behavioral changes. They become isolated or hyperactive, disobedient, more violent, or distracted, while some have problems with memory or forgetting. Many have to deal with bed-wetting,” Al Akhras said.

Omar is undergoing such a trauma. “He has begun to lose his hair. He doesn’t sleep well at night. He gets up often, screaming of nightmares or feeling that he has his leg back, and feeling the pain of losing a limb,” Yasmin told Al Jazeera.

The Palestinian boy says he feels helpless.

“I suffer a lot when I need to use the toilet with one leg. It hurts a lot. I can’t even carry a packet of vegetables. I fall down,” he says, hoping to get a prosthetic leg soon.

On Christmas Eve, Hindu hardline groups affiliated with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) announced a shutdown in the central Indian city of Raipur. The protest was called over allegations of “forced” religious conversions by Christians, a claim frequently levelled against the Christian community despite scant evidence.

That same day, groups of men armed with wooden sticks stormed a shopping mall in Raipur, vandalising Christmas decorations and disrupting celebrations. Police filed a case against 30 to 40 unidentified attackers, but arrested only six. They were released on bail within days and, upon their release, were greeted with public processions, garlands, and chants outside the jail, videos of which circulated widely on social media.

On Christmas morning, Modi visited a Catholic church in New Delhi to celebrate the occasion, but did not condemn the violence.

This incident was not the only one. According to a new report, religious hate speech and violence in India are escalating, with the country’s small Christian minority emerging as an increasingly visible target, alongside Muslims, in a climate of intensifying Hindu majoritarian rhetoric.

The research by India Hate Lab, a project of the Washington, DC-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), has found that the country recorded a total of 1,318 hate speech events in 2025, an average of more than three per day.

These events, organised and led largely by Hindu majoritarian groups as well as the governing BJP, targeted Muslims and Christians, marking a 97 percent increase in hate speech since 2023, and a 13 percent rise over 2024. While Muslims remained a primary target, the report found a sharp rise in anti-Christian rhetoric. Hate speech events targeting Christians rose from 115 in 2024 to 162 in 2025, a 41 percent increase.

This was borne out in the violence and intimidation unleashed by Hindu supremacists on Christmas celebrations last month. Instances were recorded across India, in the capital state of Delhi, as well as the states of Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Telangana and Chhattisgarh. Raipur, where the mob ravaged the mall, is the capital of Chhattisgarh.

In Madhya Pradesh, a leader from Modi’s BJP led a mob that disrupted and attacked a Christmas lunch for visually impaired children. In Delhi, women wearing Santa caps were intimidated by Hindu supremacists. In Kerala, some schools reportedly received threats from officials belonging to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – the parent organisation of the BJP and many other Hindu majoritarian groups – warning against holding Christmas celebrations, prompting the local government to announce a probe into the matter. This came after an RSS worker attacked teenage carollers in the same state.

Christians account for only 2.3 percent of India’s population, while Muslims account for 14.2 percent. The Hindu community makes up 80 percent.

Hindu supremacists have fuelled suspicion, anger and hate against religious minorities, based on conspiracy theories and other incorrect claims.

An escalation

However, the latest figures mark a new escalation in the religious hate that India’s religious minorities have had to combat ever since the BJP came to power in 2014, said experts.

The BJP’s ideological mentor, the RSS, founded in 1925, believes that India must be a “Hindu nation”, an idea that runs counter to the constitutionally enshrined value of secularism. Historical Hindu nationalist ideologues – like Vinayak Savarkar and MS Golwalkar, who Modi has publicly honoured – insisted that religious minorities like Muslims and Christians were “unwanted” and “internal enemies” of India, and called for a “permanent war” against them.

Raqib Naik, the CSOH’s said the instances of hate speech recorded in the recent report mirror this rhetoric. They present Muslims and Christians as “dual threats”, which are “foreign, demonic forces” that want to harm Hindus.

“Central to this is the ‘forced conversion’ narrative, which portrays every act of Christian charity, education, or healthcare as a deceptive tool for converting Hindus to Christianity,” Naik said. “The most pervasive theme across [the] 2025 incidents is the allegation that Christian missionaries are converting Hindus through inducement.”

This is despite the fact that between 1951 and the last national census in 2011, the Christian community in India has never exceeded 3 percent of the total population, according to data from the Pew Research Center.

Within the country’s Christian community, the hate incidents have led to fear and a deep unease, said John Dayal, the former president of the All India Catholic Union and a former member of the National Integration Council, an Indian government advisory body on matters of religious harmony. The fear of vandalism by Hindu supremacists has led to many taking unusual and extreme steps, Dayal said.

“In Raipur, the archbishop was forced to advise all churches and Christian institutions to seek police protection during Christmas,” Dayal said. “I couldn’t believe that such a letter had to be written.”

Attacks on Muslims rise

Beyond this rising anti-Christian rhetoric, hate speech against Muslims has also shot up, according to the report. The CSOH recorded that 1,289 of the total 1,318 hate speech events had hateful, violent references to Muslims.

In 2024, this figure was 1,147, while in 2023, it was 668. This shows a 93 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate speech between 2023 and 2025.

In these hate events, speakers – often from the BJP or affiliated Hindu supremacist groups – invoked conspiracy theories against Muslims: from claiming that Muslims were capturing Hindu land (“land jihad”), to Muslims strategically outnumbering Hindus (“population jihad”), to Muslim men seeking to lure Hindu women in a bid to convert them into Islam (“love jihad”).

Using such conspiracy theories, a vast majority of these events ended with calls to violence against the Muslim community, the report found. The calls ranged from boycotting Muslims to destroying their places of worship, to picking up arms and violently attacking them.

“These narratives were designed to paint minorities as organised aggressors, intent on eviscerating Hindu culture, demographic dominance and wealth,” said Naik from the CSOH.

“The large-scale dissemination of these conspiracies is a deliberate strategy to manufacture an environment of perpetual Hindu victimhood, and to enable the passage of anti-minority laws to ostensibly address these imagined threats,” he added.

Since the BJP came to power, several Indian states have introduced laws that criminalise coercive religious conversions, but critics have said these laws are veiled attempts to prevent interfaith marriages. Several ministers in these states have publicly called the laws attempts to curb “love jihad”.

In November 2025, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, in its annual report, highlighted what it called “several discriminatory pieces of legislation” in India, including on citizenship and religious conversion.

A BJP link

Much of this hate has a link to the BJP, the report found. Almost nine out of 10 hate speech events, 88 percent in all, took place in states governed by the BJP or it allies. Among the top 10 actors involved in the most hate speech, the report found five to be associated with the BJP, including Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah, widely viewed as India’s second-most powerful person after Modi.

The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, as well as of Uttarakhand, Pushkar Singh Dhami, are others named in the report as perpetrators of hate speech. In fact, Dhami topped the list of hate speech actors, with a total of 71 hate speech instances.

Al Jazeera has reached out to the BJP’s chief spokesperson, Anil Baluni, over text and email, as well as to the Ministry of Home Affairs, for comment. Neither has responded.

Ram Puniyani, an author and the president of the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism (CSSS), a research body that works on promoting religious harmony, said the rise in hate is directly linked to the BJP’s electoral fortunes. The 2024 general elections delivered an electoral setback to Modi, whose BJP lost its parliamentary majority but returned to power with allies.

“The Hindutva foot soldiers have become more and more emboldened by the party’s return to power, and hence, attacks on religious minorities are on the rise,” Puniyani said. Hindutva is the Hindu majoritarian political movement advocated by the RSS.

Pointing to the attacks on Christian missionaries, Puniyani said it was an attempt to consolidate the BJP’s base among tribal and Dalit communities, where Christian missionaries predominantly work. Dalits, historically viewed as the community least privileged under Hinduism’s complex caste system, have faced systematic discrimination for centuries.

US senators have introduced a bill aimed at preventing President Donald Trump from seizing NATO territory, including the self-governing Danish island of Greenland.

The bipartisan NATO Unity Protection Act introduced on Tuesday would bar the Department of Defense and Department of State from using funds to “blockade, occupy, annex or otherwise assert control” over the territory of any NATO member state.

The bill, authored by Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Republican Lisa Murkowski, comes amid growing concerns over Trump’s repeated insistence that Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, must be brought under Washington’s control, using force if necessary.

“This bipartisan legislation makes clear that US taxpayer dollars cannot be used for actions that would fracture NATO and violate our own commitments to NATO,” said Shaheen, who represents the state of New Hampshire, in a statement.

“This bill sends a clear message that recent rhetoric around Greenland deeply undermines America’s own national security interests and faces bipartisan opposition in Congress,” the Democratic senator said.

Murkowski, a rare Republican critic of Trump who represents Alaska, said the 32-member NATO security alliance was the “strongest line of defence” against efforts to undermine global peace and stability.

“The mere notion that America would use our vast resources against our allies is deeply troubling and must be wholly rejected by Congress in statute,” Murkowski said.

Jessica Peake, an expert in international law and the laws of war at UCLA, expressed hope that the bill would receive broad support in the US Congress.

“If such a bill were to pass it should place restraint on the president acting unilaterally and continuing to threaten our NATO relationship,” Peake told Al Jazeera.

“However, President Trump has made repeated threats against NATO in this term and the last, and we have seen in other instances that President Trump is willing to flout congressional authority when it suits his broader agenda.”

Trump’s threats to take control of Greenland have alarmed Washington’s European allies and prompted warnings about the end of NATO, which is built on the principle that an armed attack against any one member is considered an attack against all.

Trump, who claims that control of the vast Arctic territory is crucial to US national security, has brushed aside concerns about splitting the alliance, which has been a cornerstone of the Western-led security order since the end of World War II.

Trump has also claimed that China or Russia would take control of Greenland, which is home to vast reserves of fossil fuels and critical minerals, if the US does not.

“I’d love to make a deal with them. It’s easier,” Trump said on Sunday of his plans for the territory.

“But one way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland.”

In a rebuke to Trump, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, on Tuesday offered some of their most forceful comments yet in defence of Copenhagen’s sovereignty over the territory.

“If we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark,” Nielsen said at a joint news conference in Copenhagen.

“We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the EU,” he said.

Danish Minister for Foreign Affairs Lars Lokke Rasmussen and his counterpart in Greenland, Vivian Motzfeldt, are on Wednesday set to meet with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Vice President JD Vance in Washington, DC, for talks on the escalating crisis.

A bipartisan delegation of US lawmakers, including Democratic Senator Chris Coons and Republican Senator Thom Tillis, is set to arrive in Denmark on Friday for talks with local officials.

The vast majority of Greenland’s 57,000 residents have expressed opposition to US control of the territory, according to polling.