TEHRAN — Iran marked the 47th anniversary of the 1979 seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran on Wednesday, November 4, with mass rallies in the capital and across the country — and this year Iranian officials turned the annual ritual into a verdict on the United States itself, hailing the Democratic sweep of Tuesday's midterm elections as proof that American voters had rejected President Donald Trump's war on Iran.

Source: Al Jazeera, Nov 4, 2026 (Reuters/WANA photos)

Thousands of demonstrators marched through central Tehran, burning American and Israeli flags and chanting "Death to America" and "Death to Israel", Al Jazeera reported. Effigies and caricatures of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were paraded through the streets, including one showing Trump as a ferocious dog held on a leash by Netanyahu, and a dartboard carrying the two leaders' faces was photographed at the rally.

Iranian state media reported rallies at more than 900 locations nationwide. In Tehran the march set off at 9 a.m. from Palestine Square and moved along Taleghani Street to the former embassy compound — the site Iranians call the "Den of Espionage" — under this year's slogan, "Pledge to the Martyrs; Struggle Against Global Arrogance", Mehr News Agency and IRNA reported. The 900-location figure is the state media count and has not been independently verified.

"A decisive defeat" — Tehran reads the midterms as a vote against the war

Tehran Mayor Alireza Zakani told the crowd outside the former embassy that the United States and Israel had suffered a "decisive defeat", including in Tuesday's US congressional midterm elections, which were widely read as a rebuke of Trump's Republican Party. Zakani claimed the American setbacks were the result of Iranian "steadfastness and strength", Al Jazeera reported.

Iran's judiciary chief, Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi, echoed the message in a post on X: "Trump failed both in war and in politics. We will certainly impose even more defeats upon him." One banner at the rallies carried an explicit threat against the US president — "We will kill Trump" — according to The Times of Israel's reporting of the demonstrations.

Tehran's political leadership had already framed the midterm results the same way earlier on Wednesday, before the anniversary marches took over the capital's streets. Read the earlier report: Qalibaf says Americans voted "no to war"

Why November 4 is burned into US-Iran relations

On November 4, 1979, Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage. The crisis lasted 444 days and cemented the rupture between Tehran and Washington, which have had no formal diplomatic relations since. Iran observes the date every year as the National Day of Fighting Global Arrogance, and the former embassy's mural-covered walls remain the symbolic centre of the commemorations.

This year's anniversary falls in the ninth month of a war that has reshaped the region. The United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran on February 28, in which Iran's longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed. The fighting roiled global energy markets and disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas normally passes.

In Washington the same day, the man Tehran's crowds were denouncing was answering his own party's verdict on the war — Vice President JD Vance's post saying the war was why Republicans lost. Read: Vance says the Iran war is why Republicans lost the midterms

The rallies also carried a harder edge. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned on Tuesday that its potential retaliation against American and Israeli interests would no longer be restricted by geographical boundaries, according to reports of the statement — a warning issued as US Central Command strike options against Iran, prepared for the days after the midterms, remained on the table in Washington's reporting, though Trump told the Financial Times he had no immediate plans to strike and was "locked and loaded if we need to go, but there may be no reason for it", Bloomberg reported.