As many as 30,000 people may have been killed across Iran during a two-day crackdown on January 8 and 9, TIME reported on Sunday, citing two senior Health Ministry officials and a separate compilation of hospital data shared with the publication. The figures have not been independently verified and far exceed numbers publicly cited by authorities.
The number, if true, would massively increase the death toll from previously believed estimates. Days after the alleged massacre, Iran International estimated around 12,000 deaths from the two-day period.
The officials said the scale of killing overwhelmed the capacity to handle the dead, exhausting body bag stocks, and prompting the use of eighteen-wheeled trailers to move bodies. TIME reported that security forces used rooftop snipers and trucks mounted with heavy machine guns after authorities cut communications. An Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps official warned on state television that anyone entering the streets should not complain if a bullet hit them, according to the report.
A hospital-based count shared with TIME listed 30,304 deaths as of Friday, January 9, said Dr. Amir Parasta, a German-Iranian ophthalmologist who compiled the data. “We are getting closer to reality,” he said, while adding that the tally likely excludes cases from military hospitals and unreachable areas. Public health specialists quoted by TIME cautioned against over-extrapolating from hospital records but said the internal figures point to mass killing over a short period.
If numbers are accurate, massacre in Iran parallels Holocaust's Babyn Yar
Experts struggled to find historical parallels for so many people shot to death in such a brief span. TIME noted that the only comparable event in online mass killing databases involved the execution by gunfire of some 33,000 Jews during the Holocaust at Babyn Yar outside Kyiv on September 29 and 30, 1941.
Iran's Islamic Regime death toll numbers mitigate truth, impact of massacres
The government’s internal two-day count, as described to TIME, dwarfs a figure of 3,117 announced on January 21 by hardline officials who report directly to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Activists assigning names to the dead had confirmed 5,459 deaths as of Saturday and were investigating more than 17,000 additional cases, TIME reported.
Accounts gathered by TIME described the internet blackout’s role in obscuring the toll, with images of bodies trickling out via illicit satellite connections. Early on into the protests, the regime conducted a near-total internet shutdown across Iran.
Shortly afterwards, hospitals in Tehran were crowded with wounded and dead, while conditions inside Iran’s digital iron curtain left families unable to verify the fate of relatives.
The crackdown unfolded as opposition figures urged mass turnout. Throughout the protests, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi’s calls for united protests have been widely circulated.
International bodies have since moved to address alleged abuses, with the UN Human Rights Council extending an independent probe into the violence.
"The 30,000 verified deaths are almost certainly an underestimate," Columbia University researcher Les Roberts told TIME, noting that crisis mortality counts often omit victims who never reach hospitals or are buried outside official channels.
Paul B. Spiegel of Johns Hopkins praised the rapid hospital data collection under dangerous conditions but cautioned that intimidation, disrupted record keeping, and parallel military medical systems can skew tallies. Both experts said only transparent access to hospital logs, civil registries, and burial records would clarify the true toll.