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Hello and welcome to News Hour, live from the BBC World Service in London.

I'm Rebecca Kesby.

Is the United States about to launch a far worse attack on Iran than last June when Operation Midnight

Hammer targeted its nuclear program.

Well, that is the open threat from President Trump, who today warned that a massive armada is

heading towards Iran, moving quickly, he writes on social media, ready, willing and able to fulfil its mission

with speed and violence if he writes Iran doesn't make a deal.

Well, in response to that, the Iranian foreign minister Abbasarachi said

their forces are ready with their fingers on the trigger to respond to any aggression

and that it would be immediate, all out and unprecedented.

Well, we'll look in detail at the US position in a moment

with Mr Trump's former envoy to Iran.

But the wider context of these latest tensions is, of course,

the huge nationwide demonstrations in Iran this month and the brutal crackdown,

which a human rights group now says could have left tens of thousands of Iranians dead.

The group says they have confirmed the deaths of nearly 6,000 protesters,

but they expect that number to rise.

The BBC's Joe Inwood looks back at the past month.

Dangling precariously from a lamppost in Tehran, a man smashes CCTV cameras, as a crowd cheers his act of

defiance.

This was the height of the protest in early January, which for a while looked like they might bring down the Iranian regime.

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