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Protesters intensified anti-government demonstrations on main streets and universities in some Iranian cities on Saturday.
Human rights monitors have reported hundreds of deaths, including children, as the movement sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody enters its fifth week.
Demonstrators chanted “Down with the dictator” in the streets of Ardabil in the northwest of the country.
Outside universities in Kermanshah, Rasht and Tehran, students united, according to videos posted on social media.
In the city of Sanandaj, a demonstration hotspot in the northern Kurdish region, schoolgirls chanted “Women, life, freedom” in the central street.
The protests erupted after public outrage over Ms Amini’s death.
She was arrested in Tehran by Iran’s morality police for violating the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code.
The Iranian government maintains that Ms. Amini was not abused in police custody, but her family said her body showed bruises and other signs of beatings after she was detained.
At least 233 protesters have been killed since demonstrations swept across Iran on September 17, according to the US human rights monitor HRANA.
Thirty-two of them were under the age of 18, the group said. Earlier, the Oslo-based Iranian human rights group estimated that 201 people had been killed.
Iranian authorities have dismissed the unrest as an alleged Western conspiracy, without providing evidence.
Iranian public outrage over Ms Amini’s death has prompted girls and women to take off the mandatory hijab on the streets in a show of solidarity.
Other segments of society, including oil workers, have joined the movement, which has spread to at least 19 cities and is one of the biggest challenges to Iran’s theocracy since the country’s 2009 green campaign.
Business strikes resumed in major cities in the Kurdish region on Saturday, including in Bukan and Saqqez, Ms. Amini’s hometown and the birthplace of the protests.
The government responded with a brutal crackdown, arresting activists and protest organizers, condemning Iranian celebrities who expressed support, even confiscating their passports, and using live ammunition, tear gas and sonic bombs to disperse crowds, killing them.
In a video widely circulated on Saturday, paramilitary volunteer group plainclothes Baski can be seen forcing a woman into a car and firing bullets in the air during protests in Goha Dasht, northern Iran.
Widespread internet outages have also made it difficult for protesters to communicate with the outside world, while Iranian authorities have detained at least 40 journalists since the unrest began, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
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