Iran International
Rights groups and activists are sounding the alarm over what they describe as a widening campaign of pressure, arrests and intimidation against Iranian doctors and nurses who treated injured protesters.
Iran International has reviewed information from multiple sources inside Iran suggesting that at least 32 members of the country’s medical staff have been detained, with no public information available about the status of their cases.
Doctors who treated wounded protesters in cities including Qazvin, Rasht, Tabriz, Mashhad and Gorgan have been arrested or have gone missing, according to the reports.
Most of the reported arrests are said to have taken place after January 8, following the escalation of protests and the ensuing security crackdown.
‘Normalization of arrests’
Iran Medical Council chief Mohammad Raiszadeh confirmed that 17 of its members had faced judicial or security cases linked to the recent unrest, but insisted that none had been prosecuted for providing medical treatment and that no verdicts had been issued.
The Medical Council is formally a civil body but operates under heavy state oversight.
Raiszadeh, who is close to conservative political circles and previously led the establishment-aligned Basij Doctors Organization, said the council had followed up the cases with security and judicial authorities and had been told that none of the individuals were arrested solely for treating patients.
His remarks prompted criticism within the medical community.
Mahdiar Saeedian, editor-in-chief of a medical science magazine in Iran, wrote on X that the council’s position amounted to normalizing state pressure on healthcare workers.
“More unpleasant than silence is the normalization of arrests and pressure on medical staff by the Medical Council,” he wrote. “This is the result of fully turning a professional organization into a state-controlled body.”
Reported cases
UK-based outlet Kayhan London reported that doctors Masoud Ebadi-Fard Azari and his wife, Parisa Porkar, were arrested in Qazvin for allegedly treating injured protesters, adding that their whereabouts remain unknown.
Another reported case involves Golnaz Naraqi, a 41-year-old emergency medicine specialist at Hasheminejad and Shohada-ye Tajrish hospitals in Tehran, who was reportedly arrested at her home more than ten days ago.
Social media users have also reported growing pressure on medical staff accused of helping protesters anonymously.
In one account, a viewer message sent to Iran International said Farshid Pourreza, head of Golsar Hospital in Rasht, was dismissed and expelled from the hospital for supporting protesters and treating the wounded.
Health Minister Mohammad Reza Zafarghandi wrote on X that providing “the best possible medical services to every patient in a safe healthcare environment,” regardless of “any external factors,” was the health system’s top priority.
The remarks drew swift criticism online.
“As a colleague, I am waiting to see whether you remain loyal to your oath, or whether an ‘external factor’ stands in the way of it,” Nakisa Serafinincho, an Iranian doctor based in Romania, wrote on X.
Another user responded: “You can’t even protect medical staff. How can you talk about patient safety?”
Variations of this message have surfaced across pro-government platforms, from seminarians presenting bloodshed as “righteous” to well-connected insiders arguing that killing protesters in the street is cheaper than arresting and executing them one by one.
A week after Iran killed more than 36,500 people, a state-affiliated analyst, Hesamoddin Haerizadeh, framed the protests not as civic dissent but as a divinely charged war, wrapping state violence in religious and moral language.
Opening his remarks, Haerizadeh cast the uprising as an externally orchestrated assault, describing the unrest as foreign backed riots and part of a broader confrontation between the Islamic Republic and the "non-believers front."
From there, he moved beyond political framing into a religious logic that treats street protests as a battlefield where killing is not a crime but an inevitable feature of a sacred struggle.
Haerizadeh branded the protests as “armed rebellion,” insisting that what had taken place was not peaceful protest but organized violence.
Haerizadeh then introduced an explicitly theological lens, portraying the crackdown as part of what he described as a divine process of purification.
“These events are meant to separate the impure from the pure,” he said, adding that turmoil is necessary so that “the impure are distinguished from the pure.”
In one of the starkest passages, he cited a Quranic verse often used to legitimize violence against perceived enemies: “And fight them until there is no more fitna,” he said, quoting scripture, “until religion is entirely for God.”
Critics say the effect of this framing is to turn the killing of protesters into something sacred: not a state decision, but a divine sorting mechanism—a form of moral cleansing.
Haerizadeh’s rhetoric relied heavily on dehumanization, dividing society into moral categories rather than citizens with rights.
“Kill, but with a ‘pure heart,’” activist Ahmad Batebi wrote, arguing that the lecture was designed to allow perpetrators to believe: “I didn’t kill; God sifted.”
The civic technology group TavaanaTech described the session as “workshops for killing and murder,” warning that such religious framing lowers the moral barrier to atrocity.
“This language is the language of genocide,” the group wrote, “a language that first makes the victim worthless so killing becomes easier.”
Killing as bureaucratic efficiency
A separate set of remarks, contained in an audio file attributed to Ahmad Ghadiri Abyaneh – the son of a former senior Iranian diplomat – moves beyond ideology into blunt cost-benefit logic.
In an online session on Thursday, January 29, he argued that killing protesters in the street could spare the Islamic Republic the international pressure that follows formal executions.
He minimized the scale of the deaths, reducing reported killings from tens of thousands to just over 3,000, and said the cost of killing protesters on the streets was far lower than arresting and executing them one by one.
“Why didn’t you kill them on the streets?” he asked, addressing the authorities. “You know that if they had been eliminated on the spot, the cost to the system would have been far, far lower than if you tried to execute them one by one.”
“Each one becomes a case file and a source of pressure on the Islamic Republic,” he continued. “By any logic—by any religious reasoning—it would have been right to show an iron fist with a decisive strike and wipe them out on the scene.”
Mockery on state television
The narrative hardened further when a host on Ofogh TV, an IRIB channel affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, mocked reports that thousands of bodies had been transported in refrigerated trailers.
“What type of refrigerator do you think the Islamic Republic keeps the bodies in?” he asked sarcastically, offering joking options including an “ice cream machine” and a “supermarket freezer.”
The remarks sparked outrage across Iran’s political spectrum. IRIB later removed Ofogh TV’s director, Sadegh Yazdani, and pulled the program, though many critics said deeper accountability was unlikely.
'Enemies of God'
The same logic resurfaced on Sunday, when Tehran City Council head Mehdi Chamran denied protest deaths while labeling victims with one of the Islamic Republic’s harshest religious-legal categories.
“In these protests we had no deaths, and only moharebs were present with guns and knives,” Chamran said.
The term mohareb –used for those accused of waging war against God – has long been associated with the harshest punishments, including execution. Critics say it functions as a rhetorical weapon, transforming civilians into divine enemies.
Taken together, these remarks point to a single through-line: Tehran's effort to frame violence as either sacred duty or bureaucratic convenience.