Tens of thousands of Iranians marched through central Tehran and at least four provincial capitals on Sunday in the largest street demonstrations since the April 15 ceasefire, demanding relief from rolling blackouts, fuel rationing and a currency collapse that has erased what remained of household savings after six weeks of war with Israel and the United States.

The protests, which began as a teachers’ rally outside the Ministry of Education in Tehran shortly after midday, grew through the afternoon into a mass march down Enghelab Avenue toward the gates of the University of Tehran. Witnesses described a crowd that filled the boulevard for nearly two kilometers, chanting against gasoline shortages, the rial’s near-90 percent slide against the dollar since February, and the political class they blamed for both the war and the peace that followed it.

Smaller but visible demonstrations were reported in Isfahan, Mashhad, Shiraz and Tabriz, according to videos verified by Reuters and the BBC’s Persian service. Iranian state television did not broadcast live coverage of any of the marches, but the semi-official Fars news agency confirmed late Sunday that “lawful gatherings” had taken place in several cities and that authorities had “responded with restraint.”

The unrest poses the sharpest domestic test yet for Iran’s leadership since Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi signed the Islamabad ceasefire framework on April 12. Reconstruction estimates released last week by the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development put direct war damage at roughly $74 billion, with the Abadan refinery complex, the Bushehr-Isfahan power corridor and three Revolutionary Guard naval bases on Qeshm Island accounting for nearly half the total. None of those facilities is expected back online before September.

“People are not protesting the ceasefire. People are protesting that nothing has improved since the ceasefire,” said Negar Khalili, a sociologist at Allameh Tabataba’i University reached by phone in Tehran. “The bombs stopped, and then the lights kept going off, and the bread kept getting more expensive, and at some point that becomes its own kind of war.”

A senior Iranian official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss internal deliberations, said the Supreme National Security Council had met twice over the weekend, on Friday and again Sunday morning, and that the body had ruled out a return to the mass arrests that followed the 2022 protests. The official said the leadership was instead weighing an emergency cash-transfer program funded by frozen assets that European mediators have signaled could be partially released as part of a follow-on sanctions framework now being negotiated in Geneva.

President Masoud Pezeshkian, in a televised address Sunday evening, acknowledged what he called “the legitimate exhaustion of the Iranian people” and announced the formation of a new economic recovery council to be chaired by First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref. He did not announce any cabinet resignations, though three ministers, including the oil minister and the minister of energy, have been reported in domestic press as having offered to step down.

“The hardship is real, and the responsibility is ours,” Pezeshkian said. “We will not deny it, and we will not hide behind it.”

The address was notable for what it did not include. The president did not name the United States or Israel, did not invoke the wartime rhetoric that has dominated state media since March, and made only a passing reference to “the enemies of the Iranian nation,” language analysts said appeared deliberately downgraded from the formulations used as recently as last week.

“This is a government trying to pivot from war footing to recovery footing in front of a crowd that is no longer willing to wait,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based regional analyst at the Carnegie Middle East Center. “The signal to Washington and to Geneva is that Tehran needs the sanctions track to move quickly. The signal to the street is harder to read.”

In Washington, a senior State Department official said the United States was “watching the situation closely” but would not comment on the demonstrations directly. The official, who briefed reporters Sunday afternoon on condition of anonymity, said the broader negotiations over a phased sanctions framework, which began in Geneva on April 21 under Swiss and Omani mediation, would continue this week. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is scheduled to meet European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas in Brussels on Tuesday.

Oil markets, closed for the weekend, are expected to react Monday to both the protests and to a parallel announcement from OPEC+ technical committees that the cartel will leave April’s production hike in place through the May 14 ministerial meeting. Brent settled Friday at $95.20 a barrel, down from a $125 wartime peak but still about $11 above its early-February level.

“The protests are not a market-moving story unless they escalate, and there is no sign yet that they will,” said John Reilly, an energy strategist at Citi in London. “What matters for prices is whether the sanctions track delivers a credible path to Iranian barrels coming back. Right now the answer is yes, but slowly.”

The Israel Defense Forces, which have maintained heightened readiness along the northern border since the ceasefire, said in a Sunday evening statement that they had observed “no unusual activity” along any front and that the situation in Lebanon and Syria remained stable. A spokeswoman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, asked about the Iranian protests, said only that Israel “supports the right of the Iranian people to a future of their own choosing.”

In Tehran, the marches dispersed peacefully shortly after sundown, according to residents and to verified video footage. At least 40 people were detained near Vali-Asr Square in the late afternoon, the Tehran provincial governor’s office said, all of whom were expected to be released by Monday morning. No injuries were reported.

Organizers said further demonstrations were planned for Tuesday and for Friday, after weekly prayers. A teachers’ union spokeswoman, Maryam Sadeghi, told reporters outside the Ministry of Education that the rallies would continue “until the cost of bread and the cost of electricity are answered for, not explained away.”

Senior officials in both Tehran and Washington said the coming week’s Geneva round would be a critical test of whether the post-war diplomatic architecture could deliver tangible economic relief before the street outpaced the talks.