The women in Ward 209 of Tehran’s Evin prison picked their way through the rubble of their cells, stepping gingerly over the bodies of fellow inmates who lay dead on the floor. It was June 23, and Israel had just bombed the most notorious jail in the Islamic Republic.
Motahareh Gounei, a 28-year-old dental student who had been detained ten days earlier for criticising the Iranian regime, had spent the night awake, listening to the sound of explosions.
“I thought, ‘This is it. I’m dead. I’ll be buried here,’ ” she said in a phone interview from Tehran, where she has been temporarily released on bail.
The Sunday Times has independently verified that an early warning was given to a prison guard in Evin before the attack. He left with some of his colleagues, but did not evacuate the inmates or other staff members.
The next day, the war was over. Israel and Iran signed a ceasefire agreement mediated by the United States and Qatar. Over 12 days of fighting, Israel had killed some of Iran’s top nuclear scientists, destroyed its air defences and, along with the US, hit its nuclear sites — while Iran struck Israel with barrages of ballistic missiles. Eighty people in Evin, including prisoners and their families, as well as guards and other staff, were killed, according to the Iranian authorities.
For the surviving inmates, however, it was to mark the beginning of a campaign of vengeance by the regime — which appears to have used the strike on the jail as an excuse to persecute prisoners, more than 100 of whom may now be executed, lawyers fear.
Rescuers sift through the rubble after the strike on the prison
MOSTAFA ROUDAKI/MIZANONLINE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
“A spirit of vengeance has taken over the judiciary,” said a human rights lawyer from Tehran, who declined to be named. “A judge told me: ‘Our generals and officials have been killed, and we should take revenge.’ He didn’t even allow me to speak.”
The judiciary, the lawyer said, was approving executions unusually quickly and without due process. Some of those accused of spying for Israel had initially been jailed for taking part in pro-democracy protests, but were now being sent to their deaths, “without any evidence against the accused, based solely on fabricated files by security officers and confessions extracted under torture”.
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Evin is best known internationally as a symbol of the Iranian regime’s cruelty: a highly secure facility famous for torture and abuse of detainees, whose number have included high-profile figures such as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian hostage released in 2022 after six years, and Narges Mohammadi, a Nobel peace prize laureate.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her husband, Richard, in March 2022 during a press conference after her release from Evin prison and return to the UK
VICTORIA JONES/PA
For the Iranian opposition, however, it is a crucible of their fight against the regime: a place where political prisoners come together to study and hold political discussions, forming new generations of activists and leaders. Much as Robben Island prison, near Cape Town, became a centre for political organisation against apartheid, former political prisoners in Iran talk with pride of having attended “Evin University”.
Before the Israeli strike, the jail was in some ways run by its inmates. Prisoners would block those sentenced for execution from being taken away by guards. The high profile of many of the prisoners held there and the international oversight their presence brought provided a form of protection from the regime.
In 2022, during the nationwide protests sparked by the killing of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, by the “morality police”, prisoners chanted “death to the dictator” from behind its walls, and staged protests — even as security forces attacked them with tear gas and live ammunition.
Iranian prisoners in Evin in 2006
UPI PHOTO/MOHAMMAD KHEIRKHAH
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Political prisoners co-ordinated hunger strikes, smuggled letters to the media and stopped wearing the hijab.
Sepideh Qolian, 30, a writer and labour activist who spent six years in and out of Evin prison, said that when judges who had signed death warrants for political prisoners visited the jail, she and other women prevented them from entering.
“We hurled our slippers at the judges who had signed death warrants for our loved ones, and shouted: ‘You may have emptied the streets with executions and repression, but we are still here,’” she said.
Sepideh Qolian, 30, a writer and labour activist who spent six years in and out of Evin
COURTESY OF SEPIDEH QOLIAN
Now that is gone. For Evin’s female political prisoners, the Israeli strike erased years of fragile progress.
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The day after the airstrike, authorities moved 61 female political prisoners to Qarchak, a jail on the outskirts of Tehran. Unlike Evin, Qarchak lacks clean water, toilets, ventilation and medical care.
Two months later, the women there live in 40C heat, 65 of them crammed into five tiny rooms in a ward designed for the temporary accommodation of new arrivals. One prisoner described the conditions there in a phone conversation, her words interrupted regularly by a computerised female voice repeating: “This call is from Qarchak prison. The caller is an inmate.”
“Since we were transferred to Qarchak, we’ve lost the right to work in workshops and to cover our living expenses,” she said. “That means we can no longer buy groceries and are forced to eat the prison’s food, which is mostly plain rice.”
The Qarchak women’s prison in a desert, east of Tehran
Gounei, the dental student who survived the attack on Evin, said she and the other women of Ward 209 had been transferred to one of the Ministry of Intelligence’s security detention centres, known only as the “safe house”.
“The safe house is terrifying,” she said. “Your name isn’t recorded anywhere, unlike in a regular prison, where intake is at least logged. There, the law doesn’t exist. My interrogator told me: ‘I’ll rape you and dump your body in the desert.’”
Gounei spent two months there before being released on bail. Soon after, she was sentenced to 21 months in prison for “propaganda against the state” and “insulting the supreme leader”.
Her crime, as the war with Israel began in June, was to have written a tweet: “This hell may have many woodcutters, but only one devil who set it ablaze — the religious dictatorship.”
This month, about 500 male prisoners who had been moved from Evin to another prison were returned. Shackled and chained, they were beaten by the riot police who transferred them. About 100 prisoners sentenced to death were violently separated from the others, despite the efforts of inmates who fought for them to remain.
The men were severely beaten. Among them was Mohammad-Bagher Bakhtiar, 67, a former commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), now an opponent of the Islamic Republic. According to his son, Ali Reza Bakhtiar, the riot police attacked him as he tried to protect another prisoner.
Bakhtiar told The Sunday Times his father had been denied medication for his injuries, sustained in the Iran-Iraq War. “Since the transfer to Evin, due to lack of access to medical staff, the full extent of the injuries to my father and other detainees is still unknown,” he said.
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Human rights lawyers believe the regime is using accusations of spying for Israel to take revenge on innocent people who have confessed to crimes they did not commit under torture by intelligence agencies.
In June, the judiciary announced that 700 people had been arrested on suspicion of spying for Israel during the war, adding that they would show no mercy in dealing with Israeli spies.
Executions had been increasing even before the start of the war, according to human rights groups. Iran Human Rights, an NGO, said that as of May, Iranian authorities had executed 511 people in 2025 — a 96 per cent increase on the same period last year. Witness accounts by prisoners, investigations and photographs from the scene show that Israel hit at least six locations in the prison, including administrative quarters, visiting areas and cells.
Gounei said she and other inmates had been trapped in their cell until they were freed by Arghavan Fallahi, another female prisoner, who broke open the damaged door. Once outside, the guards forced them into the prison yard.
“They had turned us into human shields,” Gounei said. “I heard the soldiers arguing, regular conscripts shouting at the intelligence officers and guards: ‘You knew Evin would be attacked. You should have evacuated the prison.’”
At least one prison guard was warned of the attack. Israel has in the past given notice to people in targeted buildings, including in Gaza, ahead of strikes.
Israeli officials said the strikes targeted guards and aimed to embolden the opposition. They denied killing inmates, and said they believe the Iranian regime is exploiting the strikes as a pretext for a crackdown while presenting the war as a domestic victory. For example, one source said, Tehran initially denied prisoners had escaped after the prison was hit, only to later admit that 75 fled in the aftermath.
For Gounei, the attack made an awful situation worse.
“Israel bombed Evin to show its power. But it was a terrible mistake,” she said. “Evin is not just a prison, it is the stronghold of the Islamic Republic’s opposition.”