Iranian security forces coordinated killing, torture and sexual abuse of protesters, says Amnesty
Leaked documents and testimony reveal extent of regime’s crackdown in 2022 and how it paved the way for more brutal killings of protesters this year
Iranian security forces “coordinated” the killing, torture and sexual abuse of hundreds of people who took part in the women-led nationwide protests in September 2022, according to leaked state documents and interviews.
Tens of thousands of people, including children, took to the streets of towns and cities across Iran after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, after her arrest by the “morality” police for allegedly not complying with the country’s hijab regulations.
In response, the Iranian state instigated a brutal crackdown. Official statements and leaked documents cited by Amnesty reveal instructions for a “firm and severe” response. One leaked order instructed forces to “respond mercilessly and go as far as causing death”.
The rights group has now investigated and verified the deaths of 377 protesters and bystanders, including 56 children. It also documented the cases of 16 people who were reportedly subjected to rape while arbitrarily detained in connection with the uprising, who included six women, seven men, a 14-year-old girl and two boys aged 16 and 17.
The Amnesty report said: “State agents penetrated women and girls vaginally, anally and orally, while men and boys were penetrated anally. Victims were penetrated with wooden and metal batons, glass bottles, hosepipes and/or the sexual organs and fingers of agents.”
The harrowing findings echo testimonies gathered by the Guardian during and after the crackdown. In a Guardian report from December 2022 medics said security forces were shooting female protesters in the faces, breasts and genitals, and warned that the severity of the injuries could leave hundreds of young Iranians with permanent damage.
An X-ray of a woman shot in the crotch during Iran protests in 2022, with about 200 metal balls embedded in her upper thigh and pelvic area. Photograph: supplied
Amnesty’s report says years of impunity for the violent crackdown paved the way for the even more brutal crackdown on the nationwide anti-government protests in January 2026, which culminated in the deaths of thousands of protesters over 48 hours on 8 and 9 January.
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said: “This investigation exposes the layers of command and coordination behind the Iranian authorities’ deadly protest crackdowns. The agents on the streets operated within a hierarchical and coordinated chain of command linking them to officials who directed, enabled, facilitated and supported crimes committed on a massive scale.
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Amnesty identified 87 Iranian officials, including the late supreme leader Ali Khamenei, and Mohammad Bagheri, the former chief of the general staff of the armed forces, killed in an airstrike in June 2025, who it said should be investigated for “crimes against humanity”.
Amnesty also named the then minister of interior, Ahmad Vahidi, who has since become the general commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the then deputy minister of interior for police and security, Majid Mirahmadi.
‘This should be condemned by any thinking human’: film industry rallies behind NAZA directors
Backing comes after Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor were threatened with having their citizenship revoked and accused of treason
Film industry heavyweights across the globe have expressed solidarity with Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Oscar-winning Israeli directors of documentary NAZA, who have been threatened with having their citizenship revoked by Israel’s culture minister, who accused them of “treason against the state”.
NAZA, which was produced by the Guardian, is named for an acronym euphemistically used by Israel’s intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike on Gaza. It includes interviews with 24 Israeli military or intelligence soldiers and officers who outlined the AI-powered targeting systems used to bombard Gaza, resulting in the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.
The film builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and the Guardian between 2023 and 2025.
The 80-minute documentary won the special jury prize at this year’s Venice film festival on Saturday, after receiving a 25-minute standing ovation – a festival record. On Sunday, Israel’s culture minister, Miki Zohar, accused the directors of being willing to “harm their homeland in order to receive applause from antisemites around the world”.
Jonathan Glazer, Rachel Szor, Yuval Abraham and James Wilson in Venice. Photograph: Stefano Rellandini/AFP/Getty Images
“I will act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for treason against the state,” Zohar wrote on X.
Representatives for Venice, or the jury headed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, have not yet commented on these threats, but the artistic director of the Telluride film festival – widely acknowledged as the foremost Oscars launchpad – was swift to voice her outrage.
“Documentary film-makers are among the best long-form journalists working and critical to our understanding of the world,” said Julie Huntsinger. “To even threaten their citizenship standing is unacceptable. This should be condemned by any thinking human.”
Her words were echoed by the heads of the Locarno film festival, who said they stood “firmly in support of film-makers’ right to pursue difficult and urgent subjects without fear of reprisal. Artistic and journalistic freedom are the very foundation of what cinema can be: a space for dialogue which engages critically with the world we live in.”
They added that they “reaffirm our support for film-makers who ask difficult questions and help us reflect”.
NAZA will screen at the San Sebastián film festival next week. In a statement, its festival directors said the film “exposes the systematic genocide of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government” and that they stand “in solidarity” with the film’s makers as well as “the Palestinian people”. The documentary will show at the Bologna film festival tonight, before its North American premiere, at the New York film festival, later this month.
Tricia Tuttle, director of the Berlin film festival, said: “Artists must be free to critically examine the world. Films can provoke discussion, disagreement and criticism, but in a democratic society, the response to art must be dialogue and scrutiny, not intimidation or punishment by the state. Our team at the Berlinale stands with Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and all artists who exercise these rights.”
Abraham and Szor won the documentary Oscar in 2025 for No Other Land, about Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank, alongside their Palestinian co-directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. That film premiered at Berlin the previous year, where it won a prize. Following this victory, Abraham’s family home was targeted by a rightwing mob. “For me, that was the worst moment of all,” he told the Guardian last week. “My mum is hoping it doesn’t happen again.”
Earlier this year, Tuttle’s position came under threat after several prize winners condemned Israel’s actions against Palestinians from the stage at the closing night awards gala. In the wake of this, the German culture minister, Wolfram Weimer, convened a crisis meeting as the Bild tabloid reported Tuttle was to be fired over giving “hate speech” an airing. In response, hundreds of prominent film-makers worldwide, including from Israel, rallied around Tuttle.
Laura Poitras in Venice last week. Photograph: Alessandra Benedetti/Corbis/Getty Images
In Israel, more than 1,500 film-makers have signed a petition in support of the directors, and refuting the accusation that they have sought to damage the country’s image internationally.
Signatories include film-makers Liran Atzmor, one of the petition’s initiators, Nadav Lapid, Orna Ben Dor, Netalie Braun, Rani Blair, Hagai Levi, Shai Carmeli-Pollak and Shlomi Elkabetz.
The petition calls on those who support freedom of expression and artistic freedom to stand in solidarity with Abraham and Szor.
“In recent days, we have witnessed an unprecedented campaign of vilification and incitement against the film’s creators,” it says, warning that the rhetoric was moving increasingly close to “effectively sanctioning violence” and posed a physical threat to their lives.
So far the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences has not commented on the situation in which its recent winners find themselves. However, previous recipients of the documentary award have done so.
Laura Poitras, who won the documentary Oscar in 2015 for Citizenfour, about the whistleblower Edward Snowden, defended the film’s factual credentials.
“The facts about the mass killing of civilians in NAZA have been reported by the Guardian in dozens of rigorously fact-checked articles, and every assertion in the film is based on multiple sources,” said Poitras, who acted as a consultant on NAZA.
No Other Land co-director Hamdan Ballal with his Oscar in March 2025, shortly after he had been attacked by Israeli settlers at his home, in his village of Susya in the occupied West Bank. Photograph: Hazem Bader/AFP/Getty Images
She called the threats by Israeli government officials “a threat to journalists worldwide. They are also familiar – my reporting with the Guardian on the National Security Agency’s illegal global mass surveillance was met with similar denials and attacks by the US government.
“Despite the alarming nature of these current threats, it is important to emphasise that Israel has killed over 200 Palestinian journalists in Gaza and has normalised the murder of journalists.”
Meanwhile Nan Goldin, the US photographer and activist who worked with Poitras on the 2022 Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and Bloodshed, said she applauded NAZA’s directors “for their enormous courage in presenting a film that shows irrefutable proof of Israel’s war crimes at their own great risk.”
British film industry veterans offering their support include director Richard Eyre, who said he was “beyond shocked by anything that the Israeli government does”, and the novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, who called the pair “both brave and admirable, standing up to state oppression, steadfast in their pursuit of the truth”.
Israeli attacks in Gaza since 2023 have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, and injured more than 174,000 others, together representing more than 10% of Gaza’s prewar population. Israel launched its war after the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, when more than 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken to Gaza by militants. The majority of the dead and hostages were civilians.
Additional reporting by Andrew Pulver and Philip Oltermann
This article was amended on 16 September 2026: NSA stands for National Security Agency, not Authority, and to remove an erroneous link between WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden.
