Behesht-e Zahra

Behesht-e Zahra (Persian: "Paradise of Zahra") is Iran's largest and most historically significant cemetery, located in the Shahr-e Rey district south of Tehran. Established in the 1970s, it is the burial site of many of those killed in the 1979 revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and subsequent state violence. The cemetery carries deep symbolic weight for both the Islamic Republic, which honours its own martyrs here, and for the opposition, which has used it as a site of commemoration for victims of state repression.

According to NCRI monitors (whose reports have not been independently corroborated), Iranian authorities were actively deleting cemetery records and removing gravestones of people killed during the January 2026 uprising as of 1 June 2026. The pattern, if confirmed, would represent a systematic attempt to erase documentary evidence of the death toll from that uprising, a tactic that has been documented by human rights organisations in previous episodes of Iranian state repression, including after the November 2019 protests.

Behesht-e Zahra's role as a contested space reflects the broader information war around the January 2026 uprising. The Islamic Republic has consistently disputed opposition and international estimates of the death toll. Removing gravestones and digital records from the cemetery's official register would complicate future forensic accounting. Amnesty International and Iran Human Rights have previously used burial site analysis, including satellite imagery of grave clusters, to cross-check official casualty figures from earlier protest waves.