Hospitals become sites of care, exhaustion, repression, and resistance as nurses work through uprising, war, and economic collapse.
“We were still in shock from the events of the January 2026 uprising, and now there is war. Tehran is burning, and every day bodies and wounded people are brought to the hospital. It is hard to endure so much darkness. My colleagues and I have to work double shifts, and this makes the conditions even harder. There is no possibility of leave. We cannot refuse to work. Those who support the war should perhaps visit the hospitals and see the catastrophe up close.”
This is the account of a nurse. During the Covid-19 pandemic, when everyone was in quarantine and fear and terror had penetrated society, we remember the image of nurses spending all hours of the day and night in the most dangerous space imaginable: the hospital. They drew a fragile image of “essential” and “reproductive” labour, and at the same time of society’s capacity to endure. In this exceptional situation, it was nurses who, exposed to death and danger, constituted the necessary labour force.
This essential role and labour continued to reveal itself in different crises up to the present: the 12-day war, a brief but devastating military confrontation that brought mass casualties into hospitals; the January 2026 uprising, when wounded protesters were taken from the streets into emergency wards; and the later 39-day war, a prolonged conflict that kept hospitals and medical staff under relentless pressure. In fact, one might say that nurses and their work formed a common space, a hope within the darkness of our time. Nurses themselves were exposed to all kinds of psychological, physical, and material pressures, and yet they embodied a common ground through which another society could be imagined. On the one hand, we have heard narratives of the fragile lives of nurses; on the other, they can be understood as an essential force in sustaining life. Not simply the survival of bodies, but the social life sustained through horizontal and social forms of care. For this reason, the social subject of nurses is both exceptional and, at the same time, a compass for inventing and reproducing affects and the common within society.
Their effort, in life’s most fragile condition, where death expands more than in any other space-time, is an act and an effort to empower life; and life here means an effort to sustain society. As Spinoza says: “A free person thinks least of all of death, and the wisdom of such a person is a meditation not on death, but on life.”
From Saving the Wounded to Hiding Names: The Hospital Became Part of the Uprising
During the January 2026 uprising and the months that followed, women were not present only in the streets. They appeared in spaces that at first glance did not seem political, but gradually became part of the field of protest. One of the most important of these spaces was the hospital: a place where the boundary between care and resistance became more blurred each day. In the crowded corridors of emergency wards, many women — from nurses and doctors to the mothers and sisters of the wounded — did not merely play the role of caregivers. They were direct witnesses to violence that had moved from the street to the hospital bed. Some nurses later recounted how, before registering the names of the wounded, they were repeatedly warned of the danger of their arrest; or how, at times, they changed patients’ names so that security forces could not identify the injured. Women’s action in this space did not remain limited to medical care. Hiding the identities of the wounded, preventing the transfer of detainees, informing families, and recording what was happening inside the hospital became part of a network formed in the heart of repression. Even standing beside the beds of the wounded and refusing to allow security forces into the rooms became a form of everyday resistance.
In the accounts of women who were present in hospitals, the dead and wounded were no longer merely numbers in reports; every injured body had a story, and every name carried part of the collective memory of the uprising. By narrating these experiences, women transferred the violence hidden behind official statistics into society’s collective memory.
A nurse recounts the catastrophe of the January 2026 uprising:
“Many of the nurses who helped me treat the wounded were mostly very young trainees. On the other hand, there were so many bodies and injured people that it felt as if none of us had the ability to pass through hell. The hospital had truly turned into hell. Every moment, the number of wounded and dead increased, and as their number grew, officers stormed the hospital corridors and searched everywhere with brutality. Sometimes, if nurses resisted and refused to let them enter and inspect the rooms, the nurses themselves were arrested. The hospital had really become a battlefield. Of course, this battle was not only about resisting and pushing back the officers; this resistance was really taking place within our work itself. Our duty was to save the injured and the wounded. At times, we even witnessed acts of resistance in which some nurses hid corpses from the officers, although this had consequences for them. But bringing the wounded back to life was a battle in the depths of hell. Now our professional commitment had been criminalised.”
A person who had been shot in the eyes recounts:
“The atmosphere of the hospital was very strange; full of fear and, at the same time, a testimony to courage and deep comradeship between medical staff and the people. The nurses and doctors treated my eye without even taking money from me, and they did it secretly.”
In the days after January 2026, another nurse described the fragile state of her own nerves and mental health:
“After January, all our colleagues suffered from severe depression, long periods of insomnia, and nightmares. They are afraid of everything and have not been able to forget those events. We have witnessed psychological collapse. The use of sedatives among colleagues has increased enormously. On the one hand, we are dealing with this psychological collapse; on the other, many colleagues have been interrogated by security forces simply for fulfilling their human duty. Some have been threatened, and some have even lost their positions in the hospital. Psychological collapse is much more severe among trainees and younger staff. We try to rebuild our collective psyche by gathering together. We try to do therapy collectively. I don’t know whether it helps or not, but it is the only effective way.”
This account was given exactly one night before the war began. Now imagine that we are facing a group of people whose psyches have been profoundly damaged, and who are trying to resist by forming groups of care among themselves. But the darkness of war, and once again the arrival of bodies and masses of wounded people, obstructed the process of care. During the war, nurses had to work in hospitals with exhausted minds and bodies.
Amid the economic crises after the war and the maritime blockade, one of these nurses says:
“I have not paid my rent for two months. Even before this, my salary was not enough to cover the costs of living. Now, after the war, even that salary has not been paid to me, and they say they cannot afford to pay wages in full. I have only been paid seven million tomans for two months of work. This war continues in every single cell of our bodies.”
From Being Pushed into Precarity to Resistance: The Lives of Nurses in Crisis-Stricken Iran
On International Workers’ Day in 2019, nurses were among the main participants in the gathering, alongside other labour forces. This showed the composition and entanglement of different forms of labour and productive and reproductive forces across society, and the need to create internal solidarity among these forms. At the same time, in recent years we have witnessed strikes and protest gatherings by nurses. The main reasons for these protests have been heavy workloads and low wages, and over the past two years this situation has reached a point of fragility. In 2024, protesters in several cities chanted: “Dollar inflation, rial wages,” “We fought Covid, we saw no support,” and “Overtime pay worth pennies — shame, shame.” Contrary to the image often drawn of educated professionals and nurses, this group is internally connected to processes of being made subordinate and pushed into precarity. As such, as noted above, they are both part of the class composition and a resistant subject present in the depths of society.
This can be traced both in their protests as demanding subjects and in the course of their “essential work”: when, out of commitment to their work and to saving people, they put their own lives at risk. During the Covid-19 pandemic, they worked with a passion for life in a death-filled space. During the January 2026 uprising, while exposed to threats from security forces and attacks by riot police and other repressive forces on hospitals, they secretly treated patients. And during wartime conditions, exposed to all kinds of terrifying bombs, they entered the field without hesitation, driven by a passion for life. What we have witnessed in the lives of nurses over the past year is therefore an intersection of the desire for life, psychological collapse, low wages, and heavy workloads. In the end, through friendship and the formation of community among themselves, they are able to endure, to some extent, the pressures produced by massacre, war, and collapse. At the same time, the lives of nurses may offer a multilayered image of different oppressed groups in Iran.
