Iran urges youth to form human chains to protect power plants

Air strikes pounded Tehran on Tuesday (April 7, 2026), and Iranian officials urged young people to form human chains to protect power plants, hours before the expiration of U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest deadline for the Islamic Republic to reopen the crucial Strait of Hormuz or face punishing strikes on its infrastructure.

Mr. Trump has extended previous deadlines but suggested the one set for 8 p.m. in Washington was final, and the rhetoric on both sides reached a fever pitch, leaving Iranians on edge. Mr. Trump threatened to destroy all of Iran’s power plants and bridges if Tehran does not allow traffic to fully resume in the strait. Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said 14 million people, including himself, have volunteered to fight.

Officials involved in diplomatic efforts said talks were ongoing — but Iran has rejected the latest American proposal, and it was unclear if a deal would come in time to head off Mr. Trump’s threatened attacks. World leaders and experts warned that strikes as destructive as Mr. Trump threatened could constitute a war crime.

Meanwhile, a wave of strikes hit Iran, including in residential areas of Tehran, killing nearly three dozen people. Iran fired on Israel and Saudi Arabia, prompting the temporary closure of a major bridge.

“Power plants that are our national assets and capital,” Alireza Rahimi, identified by Iranian state television as the secretary of the Supreme Council of Youth and Adolescents, said in a video statement.

Iranians have formed human chains in the past around nuclear sites at times of heightened tensions with the West.

The paramilitary Revolutionary Guard warned that Iran would “deprive the U.S. and its allies of the region’s oil and gas for years”.

Israel’s military said it attacked an Iranian petrochemical site in Shiraz, the second day in a row it hit such a facility.

Another strike hit the Khorramabad International Airport in western Iran, and an attack on an unidentified target in Alborz province, northwest of Tehran, killed 18 people, according to state media. Nine persons were killed in the city of Shahriar and six more in Pardis in other air strikes, Iranian media reported.