After 11 days of protests, rights monitors report at least 38 deaths and 2,217 detentions, including many minors, alongside escalating violence, intimidation, and hospital and internet disruptions.
The current wave of nationwide anti-government protests began on 28 December 2025 in Tehran’s merchant economy sector and rapidly expanded from major urban centers into more than 90 cities across multiple provinces.
After 11 days, a distinct rhythm has taken shape: morning closures and strikes by shopkeepers and bazaar networks, daytime demonstrations that often intersect with university protests, and nighttime gatherings—in student dormitories and in streets—where confrontations with security forces tend to intensify. Rather than fading under pressure, this cycle has helped the protests reproduce themselves daily, linking economic disruption, campus mobilization, and street-level resistance.
Yesterday at a glance: Day 11 (7 January 2026)
On the eleventh day, protests and strikes were reported across a wide geographic range—from Tehran and Tabriz to Abadan, Shiraz, Kermanshah, Rasht, Mashhad, and many smaller cities. Based on the locations documented in day-by-day reporting, demonstrations, strikes, or clashes were reported in at least 30 cities on Day 11 alone, while human rights monitors have counted protest activity across more than 90 cities over the first phase of the uprising.
Tehran saw renewed closures in key bazaar corridors and demonstrations that faced tear gas dispersals. Tabriz registered a notable development as bazaar merchants joined the strike openly, turning a historically symbolic market into a new focal point. In several provinces—especially in parts of Lorestan, Ilam, Kermanshah, and other western cities—reports described night clashes, repeated crowd re-formation after dispersal, and the use of force to prevent gatherings from holding ground. Universities also remained active, with multiple campus gatherings and reports of student detentions.
Beyond the street scenes, Day 11 also showed how the protest’s “daily cycle” is tightening: morning strikes in commercial centers, daytime campus mobilizations, and nighttime confrontations in neighborhoods and dormitories now reinforce each other. As slogans become more explicit in calling for regime overthrow, the state response has increasingly paired street force with wider intimidation: raids, follow-up arrests, and pressure on families, students, and the wounded.
Documented human rights violations: the overall picture after 11 days
Based on aggregated reporting from human rights monitors, media documentation, and Zamaneh investigations, the state response over the first eleven days has combined street violence, mass detentions, and pressure tactics aimed at deterring participation and controlling the public narrative.
1) Arrests: a mass, often opaque detention campaign
Over 11 days, at least 2,217 people have been arrested or compelled to undergo identification procedures. The pattern suggests two parallel tracks:
• 558 cases recorded as individual arrests (often linked to specific events, names, or locations).
• 1,659 cases recorded as group detentions or arrests without confirmed identities, indicating broad sweeps where full information is unavailable.
On Day 11 alone, at least 140 people were reported arrested or identified—lower than the previous day, but still consistent with an ongoing pre-emptive containment strategy that extends beyond protest sites into follow-up summonses, field identification, and later apprehensions.
2) Children, teenagers, and students among detainees
A particularly alarming feature of this wave has been the scale of arrests involving young people:
• 165 detainees recorded as under 18 across the eleven days.
• 46 university students arrested during the same period.
Separate human rights documentation from western provinces describes significant numbers of school-age detainees. One prominent case involves reports that at least 100 school-age children were arrested in Harsin (Kermanshah Province) during protest-related sweeps. These figures reinforce a broader reality visible in field accounts: teenagers are not only present—they are often at the forefront, and state repression has expanded to meet them there.
3) Televised “confessions” as intimidation
Reports compiled by monitors indicate that around 40 televised “confessions” have been broadcast so far. Because these broadcasts are not transparent about detention conditions and legal access, the figure should be treated as a documented minimum rather than a complete total. Human rights observers typically treat these productions as coercive—recorded in detention, without meaningful access to counsel—functioning less as due process than as public intimidation and retrospective justification of repression.
4) Killings: deaths among protesters, minors, and security forces
After eleven days, at least 38 deaths have been recorded in connection with the protests. This total reportedly includes:
• 29 protesters/civilians
• 4 security or law-enforcement personnel
• 5 protesters under 18
Separate documentation focusing on western provinces reports at least 11 Kurdish citizens killed by live ammunition in several cities across Lorestan, Ilam, and Kermanshah provinces. In multiple cases, families were reportedly pressured during the return of bodies to accept official narratives that blame protesters or misidentify victims as members of pro-government forces.
5) Injuries and the pursuit of the wounded
Reliable nationwide totals for injuries remain difficult to establish due to limited access and fear of reporting. Still, recurring accounts describe:
• Injuries from live ammunition, pellet guns, and baton beatings
• A reported pattern in some areas of attempts to arrest injured protesters in hospitals, including raids that disrupt medical care and intimidate families seeking treatment for the wounded.
One of the most serious reported incidents involves the Khomeini Hospital in Ilam. After protests in Malekshahi and surrounding areas, wounded protesters were reportedly transferred to the hospital, where security forces entered the medical facility and its grounds. Witness accounts describe attempts to prevent families from gathering, the removal of some wounded individuals from the hospital before treatment was completed, and the use of force—including beatings and arrests—around the hospital premises.
Medical staff reportedly treated cases involving severe gunshot injuries, including multiple live-round wounds, while families allegedly moved some injured people out of the hospital to prevent their detention. The Health Ministry publicly emphasized that medical spaces must remain safe and that any violation should be investigated; the president reportedly ordered an inquiry. International rights advocates, including Amnesty International, have condemned the targeting of hospitals and interference with medical care as a serious breach of international norms protecting medical facilities.
This tactic—targeting the injured after street violence—turns medical spaces into extensions of policing and raises acute concerns about access to care, patient safety, and collective punishment.
6) Summonses and pressure beyond the street
Repression has not been limited to physical dispersal and detention. Reports from Day 11 also describe summonses of cultural and media figures, part of a wider approach: restricting independent documentation, narrowing the space for public speech, and deterring community leadership from shaping protest narratives.
7) Internet disruption and communications limits
Rather than a uniform nationwide shutdown, the pattern described has been regional and targeted disruption—slowdowns, unstable connections, and intermittent service failures—often in areas with heightened street protest or campus activity. While not fully stopping information flow, these disruptions appear designed to raise the cost of coordination and reduce the circulation of images.
What Day 11 suggests about the trajectory
Day 11 reinforced two parallel realities:
• The protest infrastructure is expanding, especially through the interaction of bazaar strikes, campus mobilization, and nightly street confrontations.
• The repression infrastructure is also expanding, relying on a combination of lethal force in some hotspots, mass detentions with incomplete transparency, intimidation through “confessions,” and pressure on families, hospitals, and public communicators.
The most politically consequential dimension may be the one with the highest human cost: the growing presence of minors in both the streets and detention, alongside deaths among children and teenagers. In this sense, Day 11 is not only a snapshot of a protest—it is evidence of a deepening conflict over who bears the cost of crisis, and how far the state is prepared to go to reassert control.
