Mick Hartley

From the Jerusalem Post:

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.

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.

As not covered by the BBC.

Hillel Neuer:

I said to UNHRC: “We ask the U.N., the media, celebrities, campus activists: why are you silent? The answer is uncomfortable but clear. The Iran protest movement shatters a cherished narrative. A people rising against Islamist tyranny does not fit the ideology—so it is ignored.”