Morning light enters Iran’s hospitals in thin, colorless sheets. It settles on tiled floors, on metal bed frames, on faces that have not slept. For generations, these rooms have existed as places of refuge — spaces where pain could be named, treated, and slowly eased.
In recent weeks, that understanding has begun to fracture.
After nationwide protests swept through multiple Iranian cities in January, hospitals and clinics found themselves pulled into the gravity of unrest. The demonstrations, driven by economic strain, political grievances, and social frustration, were met with a forceful security response. Streets filled with injured bodies. Ambulances ran in steady loops. Emergency wards overflowed.
What followed extended beyond the streets.
Doctors, nurses, and medical staff who treated wounded protesters report being summoned by security agencies, questioned about patients, and warned against providing care without authorization. Some were detained. Others were threatened with losing their licenses, their jobs, or their freedom. In several cities, physicians were reportedly arrested after refusing to disclose the identities of those they treated.
The hospital, once a neutral space, has begun to feel like contested ground.
Inside emergency rooms, care continues, but often under the shadow of fear. Medical workers describe lowering their voices, avoiding written records, and sometimes disguising the nature of injuries to protect patients from arrest. In certain cases, injured protesters were reportedly taken from hospital beds by security forces before completing treatment.
For young medical students and residents, the pressure has arrived early in their careers. In university campuses tied to teaching hospitals, students have organized quiet sit-ins and small gatherings, calling for the release of detained doctors and classmates. Their protests are subdued, careful, and heavy with apprehension.
Human rights organizations say the pattern points to a systematic attempt to deter healthcare workers from assisting demonstrators, effectively turning access to medical care into another instrument of control. International medical ethics standards hold that doctors must treat the wounded without discrimination, regardless of politics. In Iran’s current climate, that principle has become a source of personal risk.
The consequences ripple outward.
Some injured people now avoid hospitals altogether, seeking treatment in private homes or underground clinics. Others attempt to endure wounds in silence. Infections go untreated. Fractures heal poorly. Psychological trauma deepens in isolation.
None of this unfolds with spectacle. There are no public announcements declaring hospitals unsafe. There is only a slow tightening, felt in unanswered phone calls, empty chairs in staff rooms, and the sudden absence of familiar colleagues.
Yet within this narrowing space, many medical workers continue.
They arrive before dawn. They wash their hands. They prepare syringes and dress wounds. They do what they were trained to do, even when the cost is no longer abstract.
One year will pass. Another will follow. Political currents will shift. But the memory of this moment — when compassion itself became suspect — will linger in these corridors.
In the quiet rhythm of hospital life, the act of healing remains what it has always been: a small, stubborn refusal to let cruelty have the final word.
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Sources Reuters The Guardian Le Monde Amnesty International Iran Human Rights