An ophthalmologist in Tehran has documented more than 400 eye injuries from gunshots in a single hospital, as overwhelmed medical staff struggle to cope with the toll of an increasingly violent crackdown on nationwide protests by Iranian authorities.
Three doctors, in messages forwarded to the Guardian on Monday, described overwhelmed hospitals and emergency wings overflowing with protesters who had been shot. Medical staff said the gunshot wounds were mostly concentrated on protesters’ eyes and heads – a tactic that rights groups said authorities used against demonstrators in the country’s 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests.
“[Security forces] are deliberately shooting at the head and the eyes. They want to damage the head and the eyes so they can no longer see, the same thing they did in [2022],” said a doctor in Tehran. The doctor added that many of the patients had to have their eyes removed and were blinded.
Iran’s demonstrations, which started on 28 December over a sudden dip in the value of the country’s currency, have since turned into the country’s biggest anti-government protest movement since 2009. Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across the country each night, chanting anti-government slogans such as “death to the dictator”, a reference to the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The protests have alarmed authorities, and on Thursday night, they shut off internet and mobile access in the country, cutting the Iranian people off from the rest of the world. Rights groups have accused the government of exploiting the media blackout to carry out a brutal crackdown against protesters.
More than 2,000 people have been killed in the protests – more than 90% of whom were demonstrators – and over 16,700 people have been arrested, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) said.
The death toll, still expected to rise, was stunning. After two weeks it is already four times greater than that of the months-long 2022 Mahsa Amini protests. The authorities’ reactions to 2022 protests were previously considered a particularly violent crackdown.
Doctors in Iran said they suspected that the death toll, though shocking, was just a fraction of the true number of dead in the country. They saw a sharp rise in wounded patients arriving at hospitals immediately after Iranian authorities cut off the internet on Thursday.
“It’s like in the war movies where you see the injured soldiers getting treated on the open field. We don’t have blood, we don’t have enough medical supplies. It’s like a war zone,” the doctor from Tehran said. His colleague detailed treating injured protesters on the ground outside in freezing temperatures due to lack of space in hospital wards.
The Tehran doctor described medical staff working in challenging conditions, as the network shutdown prevented him from reaching other doctors and emergency services. He added that security forces would enter hospitals from time to time to arrest injured protesters.
The doctor said: “My colleagues are very distressed, tired and horrified. They are breaking down in tears.” One colleague, a doctor, was wounded while travelling to the hospital, after being shot by authorities.
The types of injuries seen by medical staff led them to believe that authorities were deliberately targeting the eyes of protesters, a claim echoed by rights groups. Authorities have been documented using shotguns firing metal pellets, as well as rifles with live ammunition, against protesters.
“Eyes were hit by birdshot pellets and it was deliberate, they are shooting to kill,” said the Tehran doctor. A colleague added that they had removed “20 pellets” from the body of a single protester.
Protesters have been shot in the eyes and genitals, with at least one young girl in critical condition after being shot in the pelvic area, according to a spokesperson from the US-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights.
The spokesperson said: “The evidence demonstrates that even when utilising ‘less-lethal’ weapons, the Islamic Republic deliberately targets vital organs, transforming these tools into instruments of systematic mutilation and permanent disability to terrorise protesters.”
The Iranian government has accused protesters of being behind the violence, rather than its own security forces, releasing videos of what it said were foreign saboteurs. The government has pointed to videos of protesters beating police officers, as well as gunmen from a Sunni militant group killing a police chief and mosques being ransacked, as evidence that demonstrations had taken a violent turn.
At least 135 people affiliated with the Iranian government have been killed in the protests, according to HRANA.
Protesters who managed to evade the communications blackout said that, by contrast, they witnessed authorities targeting peaceful protesters. A 20-year-old protester said that during a protest they attended in Tehran on Friday, things quickly turned deadly after the intervention of security officers.
“We were just chanting Javid Shah [Long live the king] and plainclothes killers infiltrated the people a few lines ahead and shot point blank, from behind, with guns directly at their head. We ran away and we don’t even know if they picked up the dead bodies,” they said.
Another video sent to the Guardian by activists in Iran showed a protester lying on the ground, with blood pouring out of his mouth, after particularly violent crackdowns were reported on Thursday in Fardis, in Alborz province west of Tehran. “He’s not breathing! Please hold on, I swear to god, please hold on,” a protester screams as blood continues to spurt out of the wounded man’s mouth.
Despite the brutal crackdown, protests continued into their 17th day, with crowds numbering in the thousands filling the streets each night.
Doctors cautioned, however, that while images of protests managed to make it out of the country, the world was vastly underestimating the death toll in Iran.
“The images and data broadcast by the international media do not represent even one per cent of the reality, because the information simply does not reach them,” a physician who left Iran told the US-based Center for Human Rights in Iran on Monday.
“This was a mass-casualty situation. Our facilities, space, and personnel were far below the number of injured people arriving,” the doctor said, describing the scenes in the hospital.
