Iran regime change will ‘come from within,’ says Netanyahu as protests enter third day

Iran’s leaders have “robbed their people of the future,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Newsmax on Tuesday, as anti-regime protests continued across the Islamic Republic for the third day.

“You know, if you have a change, it will come from within. It’s up to the Iranian people, and we understand what they’re going through, and we’re very sympathetic to them,” the premier told the U.S. outlet.

“This tyrannical regime has oppressed the people of Iran. They are great people, enormously gifted with a great past, and they could have a great future. But this future has been taken over, really, by these theological thugs, the mullahs and the Ayatollah who’s on top of them,” he said.

Protests extended into a fourth day on Wednesday morning after thousands of Iranian students and business owners joined the movement, according to Iran International, an opposition outlet.

Two leading Iranian state universities, Allameh Tabataba’i University and Shahid Beheshti University, announced on Wednesday morning that in-person classes would be suspended for the remainder of the current semester. Iran International cited the country’s Education Ministry as saying that the decision was due to cold weather and power outages.

Government offices in 25 out of Iran’s 31 provinces also remained closed on Wednesday morning due to an “unusual cold wave,” according to Israel’s Channel 12 News.

However, a review of weather forecasts showed no significant change from recent days. Iran has experienced low temperatures throughout the week, with similar conditions continuing through Wednesday.

Protesters in multiple Iranian cities chanted a range of political slogans in overnight protests, footage published by Iran International showed.

In Sabzevar, in the northeastern part of the Islamic Republic, Iranians were heard chanting “after all these years of crimes, death to this rule.” In the central city of Arak, demonstrators were heard chanting “this is the final battle, Pahlavi will return,” invoking the name of the former monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The U.S. State Department on Tuesday night shared a clip of a campus protest in Tehran, tweeting: “The future of Iran belongs to its youth.”

“University students across Iran are demanding their fundamental rights, even as security forces regularly confront them with intimidation and violence,” the State Department’s Persian-language account posted on X.

“These students represent some of the most educated and talented individuals in the country, but due to the failed policies of the Islamic Republic regime and its disregard for the basic rights of citizens, they have been deprived of the opportunity to build a good life,” the post continued, adding: “The future of Iran belongs to its youth.”

The regime’s leadership is facing rare expressions of widespread dissent over the country’s spiraling economic crisis, which has left the national currency at an all-time low of 1.4 million rials to one U.S. dollar.

The head of Iran’s central bank, Mohammad Reza Farzin, resigned on Monday, local news media reported. Iran’s former economy minister, Abdolnaser Hemmati, was appointed to replace Farzin.

The crisis has unfolded amid President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign, which leverages sanctions and other measures to secure a new deal on Iran’s nuclear program following the 12 days of joint Israeli and American strike on that program’s key sites in June.

Iran has seen repeated waves of popular protests since 2009 over a host of issues, including the religious oppression practiced by its theocratic rulers.

On Monday, Ali Shamkhani, a political adviser and representative of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the Defense Council, threatened an attack on Israel following a meeting between Netanyahu and Trump.

“Under Iran’s defense doctrine, some responses are determined even before the threats reach the implementation stage,” Shamkhani wrote in Hebrew on his X account, doing: “Iran’s missile and defense capabilities are uncontrollable and do not require authorization. Any aggression will be met with a severe, immediate, and unexpected response.”

It appeared shortly after Trump said he would “knock the hell out of” Iran if the regime attempted to rebuild nuclear sites targeted in June.

Channel 12 News cited Israeli security assessments on Wednesday as saying that Tehran is not expected to launch an assault on the Jewish state to divert attention from the internal unrest. However, Jerusalem continues to monitor the situation, according to the Hebrew report.