IranWire has learned that Dr. Hamid Ghareh-Hasanlou, a physician and exiled political prisoner in Yazd Prison who was arrested during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests on the 40th day following the death of Hadis Najafi in Karaj, has been deprived of seeing his children for a year. Previously, informed sources pointed to the 3,500-kilometer distance between Yazd, where Dr. Ghareh-Hasanlou is incarcerated, and Vakilabad Prison in Mashhad, where his wife, Farzaneh Ghareh-Hasanlou, is serving her sentence, describing the severe suffering endured by their children and elderly parents.
This comes as August 23 marks Doctors’ Day in Iran, a day designated in the Iranian solar calendar that coincides with the birthday of Avicenna (Ibn Sina), the prominent 10th- and 11th-century Persian physician and scholar, to honor medical professionals. In Iran, however, numerous doctors, medical students, nurses, and healthcare workers have been killed, arrested, and sentenced to long prison terms during the protests of recent years. This report focuses on physicians who did not limit their professional duty of helping citizens strictly to clinics and hospitals, stepping outside their comfort zones and now finding themselves behind bars or facing death sentences.
