Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, warned on Sunday that any attack on the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would be a declaration of war. This warning comes as United States President Donald Trump has allegedly considered assassinating Khamenei.

Pezeshkian said in a post on X: “An attack on the great leader of our country is tantamount to a full-scale war with the Iranian nation.”

Iran’s president also blamed the U.S. for the ongoing protests in Iran. “If there are hardship and constraints in the lives of the dear people of Iran, one of the main causes is the longstanding hostility and inhumane sanctions imposed by the US government and its allies,” Pezeshkian said, according to a report by The Guardian. 

During an interview with Politico on Saturday, Trump actively called for an end to Khamenei’s nearly 40-year reign, calling him “a sick man who should run his country properly and stop killing people”.

The US news website Axios reported that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had warned Trump that Israel was not prepared for Iranian retaliation and questioned the effectiveness of a US strike. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had also urged restraint, according to Axios, citing the risks to regional stability.

“It was really close,” a US official told Axios, adding that the order to strike never came, even though last week, many mainstream media outlets reported that anonymous sources claimed that an attack on Iran was imminent.

Anonymous Sources Say That A U.S. Attack on Iran Is Imminent

Trump has ramped up the war rhetoric in response to Iran’s death sentences for protesters. In a social media post on Friday, Trump thanked Tehran’s leaders, claiming they had called off scheduled executions of 800 people.

While the protests in Iran have cooled, and the streets appear more normal, some people are still chanting anti-Khamenei slogans from inside their homes.