The horror in Iran: Doctors report hospitals full of wounded and dead

The protests that started about two weeks ago in Tehran against a background of deep economic distress, quickly spread to more than a hundred cities and towns throughout the country. According to estimates, thousands of people were killed or injured, including children, and many more were arrested. Most of the victims are young protesters.

One of the most difficult testimonies comes from a hospital in Tehran: a medical staff member told of a night when “there wasn’t even time to resuscitate”. According to her, “Dozens of wounded and dead were brought to us. Many died as soon as they were placed on the emergency beds. There were direct shots to the head, to the heart. Young men in their twenties.

“Some of them didn’t make it to the hospital at all. The overcrowding was so extreme that the morgues collapsed. The refrigerator was full. They put bodies on top of each other. Then they moved them to the prayer room and placed them in piles. There was no room. There was simply no room. The victims were very young. I couldn’t look at them. Children, 20 to 25 years old. It haunts me.”

Other hospitals in the capital experienced similar distress. Hospitals went on emergency alert, all non-urgent activities were canceled, teams were called from their homes and the corridors were filled with wounded people with severe facial injuries.

According to doctors’ reports, members of the regime’s security forces use live fire, some of them shotguns with metal pellets, which leads to devastating injuries. A huge number of the injured suffer from eye injuries, which according to the medical teams has become a non-accidental pattern of operation.

Additional evidence describes a protester who was shot in the eye and the bullet exited the back of his head which led to his immediate death. At one point, the doors of one of the medical centers were closed for fear of a break-in, but wounded people broke the door, threw in a man who was shot and died.

Also in the city of Shiraz in the southwest of Iran, complete chaos was reported in the medical care: medical staff members described masses of wounded being taken to the medical centers, but there are not enough surgeons and the wounded are dying. In another hospital in the city of Rasht, the morgue was also full to capacity, and the bodies were evacuated. A source at the hospital claimed that the authorities demanded a payment of billions of riyals from the families of the dead to release the bodies for burial.

The chaos takes place under a heavy curtain of information disconnection: since Thursday, the Iranian public has been subjected to a complete shutdown of the Internet. Only in the last day, thanks to the assistance of Elon Musk, the Internet partially returned to operation through the Starlink satellite connection owned by Musk. A few leaked documents show streets burning, government buildings set on fire and crowds of people not giving up in the unprecedented struggle in Iran.

In this, the shocking silence of the World Health Organization stands out. In the face of the descriptions of the horror, the horrifying images and the undeniable testimonies from the hospitals in Tehran and other cities, the organization that is supposed to be the supreme moral voice of global medicine remains silent. There is no sharp condemnation, no clear call to stop the violence, no demand for immediate protection of medical teams and civilians. This is not a one-time occurrence but a recurring pattern.

The same organization that procrastinated at the beginning of the Corona epidemic and refused for weeks to recognize it as a worldwide epidemic, the same body that refrained from making a clear moral voice after the events of the Seven Days in October, continues even now to converge in loose formulations and political hesitations.

This silence is not neutrality, it expresses a position. And in a reality where doctors are forced to skip resuscitation and corpses pile up in the corridors, this is a position that places a heavy question mark on the performance, responsibility and morality of those who claim to lead the health of the world.