Iran escalated domestic repression during the US-Israeli military campaign, arresting more than 4,000 people, executing dozens and reducing internet access to near zero, a US-based human rights group has said.
In a 238-page report, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (Hrana) documented the destruction and examined the impact of hostilities on the civilian population between the opening day of the conflict on February 28 and the April 8 ceasefire.
Authorities in Iran used the wartime climate to tighten their crackdown on dissent, the report, published on Monday, said with civilians bearing the brunt of sustained American and Israeli bombardment.
“Iranian authorities used the war to intensify security narratives and justify arrests, restrictions on freedom of expression and violence against civilians,” the report said.
Hrana said that in the first 24 hours of fighting, US forces carried out more than 1,000 strikes while Israel launched a further 750, describing the scale and intensity as unprecedented. The US military said the pace of attacks was double the firepower used on the opening day of the 2003 Iraq campaign.
By the time a ceasefire was reached, around 13,000 targets had been struck.
Inside Iran, meanwhile, Hrana said it documented at least 4,023 arrests, with people detained on charges including espionage, threats to national security, and sharing war-related content with foreign media.
Between February 28 and May 13, the group reported 50 executions, 32 of them linked to political or security charges.
Last week, the Norway-based Iran Human Rights NGO told The National that Iran had executed 54 people since the war began, while Iranian officials put the scale of arrests far higher.
Ahmadreza Radan, commander-in-chief of Iran's law enforcement command, said on Monday that “more than 6,500 alleged homeland betrayers and spies have been arrested” since the war began, of whom 567 were described as linked to “counterrevolutionary groups”.
The process went beyond detention.
Hrana said prison conditions worsened during the conflict, while authorities expanded checkpoint networks, tightened movement restrictions and imposed an internet blackout that reduced connectivity to about one per cent of typical levels.
“Conditions in detention centres have become severely worse,” the report said, adding that the communications blackout had also impeded the work of journalists and human rights monitoring groups.
Hrana documented at least 3,636 deaths during the conflict, including 1,701 civilians. The US-based organisation said 77 per cent of its 6,324 recorded incidents involved civilian harm or damage to civilian objects – including attacks on hospitals, schools, water systems, and electricity infrastructure.
These figures, the group cautioned, represented “absolute minimums”.
The Iranian Red Crescent Society estimated that about 100,000 residential buildings were damaged during the war.
Hrana said it verified strikes on schools, hospitals, cultural sites, and hundreds of industrial and commercial facilities, including water and energy infrastructure essential to civilian life, with lasting effects on public health and welfare.
The combination of external bombardment and internal repression hit vulnerable groups particularly hard, the report finds, including children, the elderly, minority communities, and displaced families, as well as thousands of Iranians cut off from basic information about the conflict.
Hrana said documentation was constrained throughout by the very repression it sought to record.
The internet blackout, restricted access to affected areas, and the absence of any centralised official reporting mechanism all limited verification. All incidents included were corroborated by at least two independent sources drawn from a total of 177.
