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Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has made a landmark call for the international arrest of 87 senior Iranian officials, accusing them of direct involvement in crimes against humanity carried out during the brutal state crackdown on the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. The demand is anchored in a sprawling 1,000-plus-page investigative report, titled *Architects of Atrocities: State Machinery Orchestrating Crimes Against Humanity in Iran’s 2022 Woman Life Freedom Uprising*, which lays bare the full scale of systematic repression deployed by Tehran to crush the mass anti-government movement. The 2022 nationwide protests were ignited by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, an Iranian-Kurdish woman who died in morality police custody shortly after being arrested for allegedly violating the country’s strict mandatory hijab regulations. In the months of unrest and state-led retaliation that followed, hundreds of protesters and bystanders lost their lives.

After years of meticulous evidence-gathering, Amnesty’s investigation has verified the deaths of 377 civilians caught up in the crackdown, 56 of whom were children. Disproportionately, the victims came from Iran’s marginalized Kurdish and Baloch ethnic minority communities, groups that have long faced systemic discrimination under the Islamic Republic. “Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity, against protesters demanding dignity, human rights and fundamental political change,” Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, told reporters at the report’s official launch press conference on Wednesday.

Callamard detailed the full scope of state abuses, confirming that Iranian security and political institutions carried out deliberate crimes against humanity including extrajudicial murder, widespread torture, enforced disappearances, arbitrary mass imprisonment, sexual violence including rape, and targeted persecution on the basis of political belief, gender identity, ethnicity, and religion—all in a coordinated campaign to annihilate the uprising. The rights group is pushing for two key international actions to deliver accountability: first, it calls on the United Nations General Assembly to create a dedicated international criminal justice mechanism that can investigate crimes, prosecute perpetrators, and deter future repressive crackdowns on dissent. Second, it demands the UN Security Council refer the entire situation in Iran to the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor for formal investigation.

Joining Callamard at the press conference was Mahsa Piraei, an Iranian activist whose mother was shot and killed by security forces during protests in the western city of Kermanshah. Piraei emphasized that accountability cannot stop at low-level officers who carried out violence, arguing that blame extends all the way up Iran’s chain of command. “The person who fired the shot that killed my mother must be held accountable, but it must not stop there,” she said. “My mother was not killed by the actions of just one person – she was killed by a system.”

In a striking rebuke of outside military intervention, Callamard also warned that ongoing unlawful military attacks on Iran by the United States and Israel are severely undermining global efforts to secure justice for victims of the 2022 crackdown, and called for an immediate enduring ceasefire across Iranian territory. Since the US-Israeli military campaign launched in February, at least 3,600 Iranians—including both senior government officials and civilian non-combatants—have been killed. The US has publicly justified its military assault by pointing to a separate January 2025 crackdown on anti-government demonstrations, where Iranian security forces killed thousands of protesters within days.

But rights groups have documented that the US-Israeli war has also killed and wounded Iranian dissidents and opponents of the Islamic Republic, including political prisoners held in jails located in strategically targeted areas. In response to the external invasion, the Iranian government has also sharply ramped up internal repression against domestic dissent. Six of the 87 officials named in Amnesty’s report have already been killed in targeted strikes during the war, while other senior figures implicated in the 2022 crackdown—including Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps chief Ahmad Vahidi—have received promotions within the Iranian government.

Callamard made clear that Amnesty opposes both the targeted killing of Iranian officials and the efforts by Washington and Tel Aviv to instrumentalize documented human rights abuses in Iran to justify their full-scale military assault. “No matter how complex the panorama is…we want to insist that international law should guide the path of action right now,” she said. “A principled response required rejecting both unlawful military attacks and impunity for crimes against humanity.”

Perched on a strategic hilltop just outside Israel’s self-declared Yellow Line in south Lebanon, the small village of Ghandouriyeh bears the brutal, visible scars of months of cross-border conflict. Most of its residential buildings stand as hollowed rubble or flattened heaps of concrete, the result of Israeli strikes earlier this year that turned once-lived-in homes into uninhabitable wreckage. It is here that 66-year-old Mariam Ismail Ballout waited on August 28 at the entrance of a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) mobile medical clinic, desperate to collect medication and escape the chaos that has upended her life.

“All our houses are ruined, all our houses are on the ground, demolished,” Ballout told Middle East Eye, her voice cracking before tears overtook her. She lost everything when her home burned to the ground: no refrigerator, no washing machine, no access to gas for cooking—every basic necessity of daily life gone overnight.

Ghandouriyeh sits just south of Froun, one of Lebanon’s designated “pilot zones” in the Nabatieh governorate, a region that has remained on edge despite a US-brokered ceasefire announced in June. A rolling green valley called Wadi al-Hujeir blocks direct sightlines to Israeli military positions on the other side of the border, but little else shields residents from the constant threat of violence. A large plastic bin marked with an Arabic warning of “enemy” territory beyond is the only barrier between the village outskirts and roads now closed to all travel.

Against all advice, roughly 228 families have returned to Ghandouriyeh in recent months, even though the village has no access to running water or electricity. Village mayor Mohammed Ali Nader told Middle East Eye that most returnees have no other option: they cannot afford to rent housing elsewhere, forcing them to cram into damaged, partially standing homes and share space with neighbors who have also lost everything. While Nader confirmed the village has not suffered a direct strike in months, residents live in a permanent state of high alert—a chronic stress that medical experts say is fueling a growing, underreported mental health crisis across the region.

MSF, which operates daily mobile medical units across hard-to-reach parts of south Lebanon, has become a critical lifeline for communities cut off from regular healthcare access. Almas Al Andary, a 33-year-old MSF counselor and clinical psychologist working out of the Ghandouriyeh clinic, says the conflict has triggered new mental health disorders among people who never experienced symptoms before. “We definitely see a lot of people having acute stress disorders. And these symptoms we can’t formally diagnose because the crisis is still ongoing,” Al Andary explained. Intense, persistent responses to daily triggers—including the constant buzzing of Israeli drones that hover over the village nearly every day—are the most common complaints: widespread tension, hypervigilance, crippling fear, and constant anxiety about the next strike.

MSF’s internal records reflect the scale of the growing need: since the war resumed on March 2, the organization’s counselors have conducted 1,326 individual mental health sessions across southern Lebanon, and requests for psychological support have climbed steadily month over month. On the day of Middle East Eye’s visit to Ghandouriyeh, the persistent hum of an Israeli drone hung over the village. Only three patients came to the clinic that day—an unusually low number, which Al Andary attributed to overnight air strikes that sent most residents fleeing to the relative safety of the valley overnight. Of the three patients that did show up, two were first-time visitors seeking mental health support.

The crisis extends far beyond Ghandouriyeh. Earlier this year, Embrace, a leading Lebanese mental health non-profit that runs the country’s National Lifeline, reported that call volume during the 2026 conflict was 55 percent higher than during the 2024 cross-border war. Despite this surge, little public data exists to document the full scope of mental health harm in southern Lebanon under the fragile, nominally ceasefire conditions. On the ground, frontline medics say the reality is stark. Farah Kerbaj, a community health educator, told Middle East Eye that widespread sleep disorders are rampant, forcing many residents to rely on sleep and mental health medications just to get through the day. Reem Farhat, an MSF midwife working in the region, added that most patients she sees are in a state of constant agitation, their nerves frayed by months of uncertainty.

Stigma around mental health treatment and the chaos of tracking care for displaced families have only compounded the crisis, medics say. For Ghandouriyeh, the most urgent immediate need is access to clean water—without it, residents cannot grow crops to feed their families, the mayor says. But even the most basic calm remains out of reach: most families keep their bags packed, ready to flee at a moment’s notice, a constant state of readiness that aligns with the hypervigilance Al Andary documents in her patients.

“We’re fed up, honestly. We’re fed up with wars; we’ve had enough wars,” said Mohammed Gannem, a local resident who returned to Ghandouriyeh with his family in June, relieved to find his home still standing but still unable to sleep through the night. Gannem says he is particularly worried about the impact of constant conflict on his two young daughters; his youngest, nearly two years old, now flinches in terror at the sound of incoming shelling, a fear she never had before this year’s war.

Medics say the steady rise in demand for mental health support has two overlapping causes: a growing willingness among Lebanese people to seek help for mental health struggles, as historical stigma slowly fades, and a parallel rise in desperation as the ceasefire holds in name only. Israel continues to carry out strikes beyond the Yellow Line in Nabatieh, Tyre, and other southern districts, which have claimed dozens of lives since the June truce. The Lebanese Army confirmed last week it has ramped up operations in southern non-occupied areas amid growing signs of escalating tensions.

Georges Jreij, an MSF counselor based at another mobile clinic in Beirut’s southern suburbs, says mental health distress often rises in waves following the outbreak of conflict, with a predictable surge around the six-month mark— a threshold the war will hit this month. “It’s usually the time it takes for the brain to really realise the situation, to be able to think about the stuff that people are going through,” Jreij explained. “And the central nervous system sort of calms down in these periods, so other sides of the brain are reactivated.”

As the MSF clinic’s day in Ghandouriyeh drew to a close, a brief, unexpected sound cut through the constant drone buzz: the playful jingle of a pale pink ice cream van, its windscreen cracked from past strikes, slowly winding past the piles of ruined homes. For a moment, the sound offered a faint, fleeting echo of normal life in the hilltop village. But as the jingle faded into the distance, the menacing buzz of surveillance drones returned, a constant reminder that for the residents of south Lebanon, the crisis is far from over.

In the early hours of Wednesday, a six-story residential building that had sustained previous damage from Israeli military strikes in western Gaza City collapsed suddenly, leaving at least 14 people dead and dozens more — including many children — trapped under tons of rubble. The catastrophe unfolded while most residents inside were asleep, according to local emergency officials.

The building, located on al-Sinaa Street, was home to more than 10 extended families totaling approximately 80 people, a large share of whom were children. As of Wednesday afternoon, Gaza’s Civil Defence, the territory’s official emergency and rescue agency, confirmed that 14 bodies had been recovered from the site, including five children, while 10 injured survivors have been pulled out and transported to local medical facilities.

Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Civil Defence, told reporters that rescue teams can still hear the cries of trapped people calling for help from beneath the debris, and crews are working around the clock to reach them. Abdullah al-Majdalawi, the agency’s director of public relations and media, added that operations have continued nonstop since the collapse was reported at roughly 3:10 a.m. local time. “Every victim we have pulled from beneath the rubble appears to have been sleeping on a mattress. They were asleep when the building collapsed,” Majdalawi explained to Middle East Eye in an on-site interview.

Critical equipment shortages have severely hampered rescue efforts, however. Years of Israeli military operations have destroyed the vast majority of Gaza’s heavy rescue machinery, leaving crews without the tools needed to clear large sections of reinforced concrete quickly. “We lack even the most basic tools,” Majdalawi said. “In the first moments after the collapse, we had to ask neighbours and displaced people nearby to bring hammers, shovels and other tools because of the severe shortage of equipment.”

Witnesses who live in the surrounding area described the collapse as sudden and devastating. Talal al-Harazin, a 53-year-old displaced Palestinian who lives in a makeshift tent near the building, said the sudden collapse felt like an earthquake. “It took less than 10 seconds for the entire building to come down,” he recalled. Al-Harazin added that the building had been visibly unstable for weeks: it had already sunk roughly three floors after an earlier Israeli strike, and debris fell from its damaged facade daily. “Unfortunately, we expected it to collapse. People had warned them, but they said, ‘Where can we live?’” he said. “Just yesterday, stones fell from it, and we said it could collapse. And that same night, it collapsed.”

Sabreen Nassir, a 33-year-old displaced woman who also lives in a nearby encampment, said two of her daughters’ close friends remain trapped under the rubble. “My daughters are standing here, watching and waiting for their friends to be pulled out,” Nassir said, noting her family has lived near the building for seven months as displaced people.

This disaster is not an isolated incident, according to Civil Defence officials. An estimated 2,000 damaged buildings across the Gaza Strip are currently at high risk of sudden collapse after sustaining damage from Israeli strikes, and the vast majority of these structures remain occupied because residents have no alternative shelter. “This is a recurring situation. Buildings at risk of collapse are becoming graves for their residents. The only difference is the timing,” Majdalawi warned. “Dozens of homes have collapsed, and dozens of people have been killed in this way.”

Officials are also sounding the alarm about growing risks as the winter season approaches. Without a massive influx of temporary shelter units and reconstruction materials, far more deadly disasters are on the horizon, Majdalawi said. “We are now on the verge of a real disaster as winter approaches. If mobile homes, caravans and reconstruction materials are not brought into Gaza, we will see more of these disasters.”

The ongoing shelter crisis in Gaza stems from the widespread destruction of housing during Israel’s military campaign that began in 2023. UN data estimates that roughly 90 percent of all housing units across Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, leaving nearly all of the territory’s 2.2 million residents internally displaced. A report released last month by the Shelter Cluster, led by the Norwegian Refugee Council, found that 1.98 million Palestinians — 94 percent of Gaza’s total population — require urgent shelter assistance and basic household supplies.

A US-mediated ceasefire agreement reached in October last year was meant to end hostilities, open Gaza’s borders to large-scale humanitarian aid including construction and shelter materials, and launch formal reconstruction efforts. But Israel has repeatedly violated the terms of the truce, carrying out near-daily military operations across the territory, restricting access for reconstruction teams, and blocking the entry of most critical aid supplies, including materials needed to repair or replace damaged housing.