Trump says 'I greatly respect' Iran leaders for halting hangings as protests subside
WASHINGTON (TNND) — President Donald Trump on Friday thanked Iran's leadership for canceling scheduled hangings as protests over the ailing economy seemed to calm down and life seemingly returned to normal.
"I greatly respect the fact that all scheduled hangings, which were to take place yesterday (Over 800 of them), have been cancelled by the leadership of Iran," Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Since protests in the Islamic Republic broke out on Dec. 28, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency on Friday put the death toll at 2,797.
Trump said Wednesday that a “credible source” told him killings tied to Iran’s ongoing crackdown on protesters have stopped.
“We’ll find out,” the president said in the Oval Office, adding that time would tell whether Iran’s actions match its words.
Trump repeatedly threatened that the U.S. would strike Iran if it continued to violently kill people protesting.
If Iran "kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go," Trump wrote in a Truth Social post earlier this month.
Other steps Trump has taken against Iran include cancelling all meetings with Iranian officials, vowing to intervene if more demonstrators were killed, and threatening a 25% tariff on countries that do business with Iran.
Iran responded by taunting the U.S. president on television with a photo during his attempted assassination at a 2024 rally in Pennsylvania with the words, "This time it will not miss the target."
The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced on Thursday it was imposing a new round of sanctions "against the architects of the Iranian regime’s brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrators."
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. "stands firmly behind the Iranian people in their call for freedom and justice," adding that the Treasury "will use every tool to target those behind the regime's tyrannical oppression of human rights."
Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a member of Iran's Assembly of Experts and Guardian Council, long known for his hard-line views, 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 ambulances, 71 fire department vehicles and another 50 emergency vehicles also sustained damage.
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Editor's note: The Associated Press contributed to this article.











