Multiple protests in Iran raged on streets into Thursday even as the nation’s intelligence minister and army chief renewed threats against local dissent and the broader world.

The protests, sparked by the September 16 death of a 22-year-old woman after her detention by the country’s morality police, have grown into one of the largest sustained challenges to the nation’s theocracy since the chaotic months after its 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Online videos emerging from Iran, despite government efforts to suppress the internet, appeared to show demonstrations in the capital, Tehran as well as cities elsewhere in the country. Near Isfahan, video showed clouds of tear gas. Shouts of “Death to the Dictator” could be heard — a common chant in the protests targeting Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

At least 328 people have been killed and 14,825 others arrested in the unrest, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that’s been monitoring the protests during their 54 days. Iran’s government for weeks has remained silent on casualty figures while state media counterfactually claims security forces have killed no one.

As demonstrators now return to the streets to mark 40th-day remembrances for those slain earlier — commemorations common in Iran and the wider Middle East — the protests may turn into cyclical confrontations between an increasingly disillusioned public and security forces that turn to greater violence to suppress them.

It wasn’t immediately clear if there were injuries or arrests in this round of protests, though Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency acknowledged the demonstrations near Isfahan. They commemorated the September 30 crackdown at Zahedan, a city in Iran’s restive Sistan and Baluchestan province, in which activists say security forces killed nearly 100 people in the deadliest violence to strike amid the demonstrations.

Iranian officials have kept up their threats against the demonstrators and the wider world. In an interview with Mr. Khamenei’s personal website, the Iranian intelligence minister, Esmail Khatib, renewed threats against Saudi Arabia, a nation along with Britain, Israel, and the U.S. that officials have blamed for fomenting unrest that appears focused on local grievances.

Mr. Khatib warned that Iran’s “strategic patience” could run out.

“Throwing stones at powerful Iran by countries sitting in glass houses has no meaning other than crossing the borders of rationality into the darkness of stupidity,” he said. “Undoubtedly, if the will of the Islamic Republic of Iran is given to reciprocate and punish these countries, the glass palaces will collapse and these countries will not see stability.”

The commander of the ground forces of Iran’s regular army, Brigadier General Kiumars Heydari, separately issued his own threat against the protesters, whom he called “flies.”

“If these flies are not dealt with today as the revolutionary society expects, it is the will of the supreme leader of the revolution,” he reportedly said. “But the day he issues an order to deal with them, they will definitely have no place in the country.”

Iran blames a London-based, Farsi-language satellite news channel once majority-owned by a Saudi national, Iran International, for stirring up protesters. The broadcaster in recent days said the Metropolitan Police warned that two of its British-Iranian journalists faced threats from Iran that “represent an imminent, credible and significant risk to their lives and those of their families.”

Last week President Biden said that he would “free Iran,” and that protesters in the country looked to be making progress toward “free themselves.” Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, responded to Mr. Biden’s remarks at a rally to mark Iranian students’ 1979 takeover of the American Embassy by saying they were “probably due to the absent-mindedness that he suffers from.”

Meanwhile Thursday,  a top official in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, said in a speech that his forces “achieved” acquiring hypersonic missiles. However, he offered no photograph, video, or other evidence to support the claim and the Guard’s vast ballistic missile program is not known to have any of the weapons in its arsenal.