Doctors in Iran have described mass casualties, overwhelmed hospitals and a huge surge in eye injuries from gunshot wounds, as the violent crackdown on protesters continues. 

One doctor says the nature of injuries changed from pellet wounds to live ammunition in the days following the internet blackout by Iranian authorities on Thursday 8 January. 

“From midnight of Thursday onward, the calls were no longer about pellet wounds,” the doctor, who has since left Iran, said in an interview with the US-based Center for Human Rights in Iran on Monday.

“People were saying they had been shot, with bullets entering one side of the body and exiting the other. [It was] live ammunition.”