(Israel Hayom) – The British Guardian published a series of X-rays of protesters wounded during the unrest in Iran last month, indicating that police forces and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired with the intent to kill demonstrators.

The images, secretly taken from a hospital in a major Iranian city during a single evening in January, show bullets lodged in the chests, skulls and abdominal cavities of demonstrators who had taken to the streets to protest against the ayatollah regime. Medical experts who reviewed the material said the wounds indicate that security forces aimed at protesters’ “center of mass” rather than using crowd control tactics.

In addition to high-velocity rifle rounds, the scans reveal close-range shotgun injuries, suggesting that police and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired at detainees or individuals who had already been apprehended.

In total, 75 sets of medical images, primarily X-rays and CT scans, were shared with the Guardian from the single hospital. The grayscale images chronicle the lethal violence inflicted by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps against protesters and bystanders, underscoring the intensity of the bloodshed within just a few hours at one mid-sized urban medical center.

The documentation adds to accounts previously given by doctors and protesters across Iran, who said security forces escalated from traditional crowd-dispersal methods to the use of assault rifles and high-caliber shotguns. The images show a pattern of gunshot wounds to the face, chest and genitals, a trend also reported during the 2022 “Women, Life, Freedom” protests that erupted after the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody.

Dr. Rohini Haar, an emergency physician, adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and medical adviser to Physicians for Human Rights, reviewed the scans and described the cases as “shocking” in both their number and severity.

“Using live ammunition and large-gauge bullets against so many individuals is … extremely unusual and notable, even globally,” Haar said.

The death toll from the protests that swept Iran last month remains unclear. Various organizations and sources estimate that between several thousand and as many as 30,000 people may have been killed. Footage smuggled out of morgues in different parts of the country shows dozens and in some cases hundreds of bodies brought in, though the regime maintains that fewer than 3,000 people have died in the unrest.