Iranian doctors arrested for treating protesters

Mohammad Raiszadeh, chief of the state-affiliated Medical Council, verified 17 arrests but claimed that no prosecutions for treating protesters occurred and that no rulings have been reached.

By Dinah Bucholz, Jewish Breaking News

As Iranian doctors, nurses, and health care workers are detained, go missing, or undergo a campaign of threats, harassment, and intimidation for treating injured protesters, human rights groups and activists are raising the alarm.

Iran International, a London-based, Persian-language news channel, has compiled reports from sources within Iran showing that at least 32 medical personnel have been arrested, with most of the arrests taking place after the most intense period of the government crackdown on protesters, Jan. 8.

On that day and the next, some reports put the death toll at more than 30,000 people.

The sources say that doctors from multiple cities, including Qazvin, Rasht, Tabriz, Mashhad, and Gorgan, have disappeared or been arrested. Their current status remains unknown.

Mohammad Raiszadeh, chief of the state-affiliated Medical Council, verified 17 arrests but claimed that no prosecutions for treating protesters occurred and that no rulings have been reached.

He added that the council had investigated the arrests and had been told by the authorities that no one had been arrested purely for medical treatment of protesters.

Raiszadeh formerly ran the Basij Doctors Organization. The Basij is the volunteer paramilitary arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Raiszadeh’s comments drew pushback from other leading medical professionals.

“More unpleasant than silence is the normalization of arrests and pressure on medical staff by the Medical Council,” wrote Mahdiar Saeedian, editor-in-chief of a medical science magazine in Iran.

“This is the result of fully turning a professional organization into a state-controlled body.”

Specific cases of missing doctors have been reported. Masoud Ebadi-Fard Azari and his wife, Parisa Porkar, were arrested in Qazvin for treating protesters, according to Kayhan London, a U.K.-based news organization.

The outlet reported that their whereabouts remain unknown.

Golnaz Naraqi, a 41-year-old emergency medicine specialist at two hospitals in Tehran, was reportedly arrested less than two weeks ago.

Posts on social media have also accused the authorities of increasing pressure on medical professionals not to treat protesters. One social media account posted that Farshid Pourreza, head of Golsar Hospital in Rasht, had been fired for providing medical aid to protesters.

Iran’s Health Minister, Mohammad Reza Zafarghandi, drew mockery for his statement that providing “the best possible medical services to every patient in a safe healthcare environment,” no matter the “external factors,” remained the health establishment’s main goal.

Nakisa Serafinincho, an Iranian doctor living in Romania, wrote on X, “As a colleague, I am waiting to see whether you remain loyal to your oath or whether an ‘external factor’ stands in the way of it.”

“You can’t even protect medical staff,” another user posted. “How can you talk about patient safety?”