Iran marked the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the United States embassy in Tehran on Wednesday with mass rallies in the capital, as officials used the occasion to hail what they called US and Israeli “defeats” in recent elections and on the battlefield.

On November 4, 1979, Iranian students stormed the US embassy, taking 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days, a crisis that cemented the rupture between Tehran and Washington, which have had no formal diplomatic relations since.

This year’s anniversary comes against the backdrop of a war launched by the US and Israel against Iran on February 28, in which Iran’s longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed, roiling global energy markets and disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

Thousands of demonstrators marched through central Tehran, burning US and Israeli flags and chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”. Effigies and caricatures of US President Donald 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.

Tehran Mayor Alireza Zakani told the crowd that the US and Israel had suffered a “decisive defeat”, including in Tuesday’s US congressional midterm elections, which was considered a rebuke of Trump’s Republican Party, claiming US weaknesses were the result of Iranian “steadfastness and strength”.

Iran’s judiciary chief, Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi, echoed the message in a post on X, saying: “Trump failed both in war and in politics. We will certainly impose even more defeats upon him.”

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